Portfolio Project

WEEK FOUR: RESEARCH

Dear Bloggies,

I've decided to take a break from exploding my brain to take a step back and research.

I want to focus on one movie in general: Synchedoche, New York. I can confidently say this movie changed my entire perspective on film, and this is coming from a girl who had already finished all her 12 college applications for film majors. 

The plot of this movie is that Caden Cotard, a theatre director, has a strange disease that is causing to shut his body down. After his wife and daughter leave him, he leaves his home to go to Schenectady, New York, and create a play about his life. He created an entire mock-up of the city and as he casts actors for every single person in his life, the line between fantasy and real life starts to become blurred.

In other words, watch the movie.

The film's theme is just how human life works and the ordinary aspects of it. This is exactly what I want to do. I want to take a simple message and create a film that you would never expect to represent it. I know, I keep telling you guys this but don't actually make it. That's a different issue, now back to research.

COLOR The lighting of the film is consistently dark and blue-tinted. It helps develop the tone because as the story progresses, the audience becomes more skeptical of what's real and what's not, while still understanding the pain of Caden. I want to focus on the color of my film as well, something I don't tend to think about when I create a film. The goal is dark with lighter aspects to match the "psychological, trippy, average" genre (please try and visualize without knowing my plot).

POST-MODERNISM My favorite lesson from this year was our postmodernism lecture. I never knew the name of my favorite genre, and to truly understand it just made everything make more sense. Post-modernism is when movies ain to subvert highly-regarded expectations, which can be in the form of blending genres or messing with the narrative nature of the film. For example, Taxi Driver, Pulp Fiction, and of course, Synecdoche, New York. This concept would be extremely hard for a 5-minute short film, so I am going to take aspects from it and create a psychological, almost drama genre. Specifically, I want to include an alternative narrative, which challenge the linearity of classical film narrative. Also, pastiche, which is combining aspects from different genres, as I previously explained. These are both heavily used in Synecoche and are shown through small details such as different newspaper dates, 

unrealistic events, and heavy dialogue.

TARGET AUDIENCE I keep thinking back to this one. It's hard to choose a target audience for such a niche genre. For most post-modernistic films, you would think that the target audience is older, given the deeper meanings and heavy concepts. But after researching different target audiences for different films with similar concepts, I see a trend of the target audience being younger, almost young adults to teendagers. I definitely am going to cater my film to young adults as well. Starting at my age ranging to older 20's. I understand how these ages work and what they will catch onto versus what they won't. I also think they will make the connection between my basic storyline and the deeper message.

BRB about to go finalize my story, and then this blog will make more sense.

ms. spielberg