So Gabe called me at midnight and had an amazing idea for a movie. We decided to ditch our last movie because we ran into too many issues, such as length, and locations.

The new movie idea is meant to begin like any regular action movie, its meant to have elements of violence and drugs, and intense music to match it. After the two main characters get ready for a mission they enter an elevator and before it closes, an elderly lady walks into the elevator last second and they share an awkward scene. We will make sure to swap the action-esque themes into comedic elements for the rest of the scene. I told Gabe that dialogue isnt really a high school actors best suit, so there wont be a lot of dialogue.

Gabe and I decided for props that we were gonna use our houses and Nerf guns that are spray painted down, we have a couple of Nerf guns just laying around. We thought it wouldn't look convincing so we looked up some videos on them and found it to look pretty realistic, especially with our "budget".

On the recommended page I started clicking around and found some really cool stuff. I found a video of a man that custom built a Nerf gun and made it look insane. He buffed the gun and spray painted it to make it look really realistic.

I think that even though we have a low budget well do fine with makeshift props and what not.

In order to be believable, Getting the right actors in my opinion is one of the most important aspects to a well made movie, show, etc.

TV shows that I see on Netflix are mostly boring, cringe worthy, and almost seem drawn out. I saw this happening when I saw a couple of episodes of Santa Clarita Diet. This show has a great plot and could have been done well, if it weren't for the actors that make it seem as if they are role-playing, and not actually representing a character. The punchlines are sometimes over exaggerated by the actors and sometimes the actors are just unnecessarily loud.
I feel the actors simply ruined a great idea for a movie, shame. In the case of Zathura: A Space Adventure, the opposite seems to happen. The movie is clearly trying to coat tail from Jumanji's success and uses the same idea of a board game that comes to life. Usually im not fond for unoriginality, but, the actors in Zathura made me enjoy it even more than Jumanji. My love for space might have created a bias towards it, but I believe the actors really sold that they were outer space and actually in a disaster of a situation.
In the Netflix series, Stranger Things, I believed that the kid actors were not believable. A controversial opinion, but it is still my opinion.

I was pondering on what sound components I could use in a dark comedy so I did some research.  I learned about how to score a comedy and decided to stick with those components to keep in mind while I edit the intro. My brother has made sounds for me before since he is an artist that has made many songs. He is into EDM and goes to almost every festival, because of that I can use him to make the sounds that we need and not worry about the copyrights of it as well.
We also intend to Foley any other sounds that we wont be able to make and to help us we decided to use a guide online.


The guide will help us figure out specific noises such as an arrow flying by "Use a thin bamboo stick, such as the type used to hold up plants in a garden. Whip it past the microphone.".





The Guide To Sound Effects. (n.d.). Retrieved March 19, 2018, from http://www.epicsound.com/sfx/

How to Score Comedy. (n.d.). Retrieved March 19, 2018, from https://music.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-score-comedy--audio-20733

In our groups we discussed our various ideas that we made in our individual groups. We criticized each others ideas and suggested new ones. Gabe and I were told in both of our groups that our ideas would take to long and so we had to decide which scenes were irrelevant or how else we could portray our ideas.

Since we needed to figure out how to write this flashback, I decided to look up how to make a flashback scene. I found an article that shows you the 7 steps and goes in depth into each rule.
This article helped me to understand how to organize our flashback scene in order to make the most sense to the audience.

How to Write a Flashback Scene: 7 Key Steps. (2017, July 11). Retrieved March 19, 2018, from https://www.nownovel.com/blog/incorporate-flashbacks-flashbacks-into-a-story/

Gabe and I made the storyboard to our movie opening, here’s what we came up with so far:



The purpose of the story board is to help us when doing the filming of the project. It keeps us organized and prepared. It also will keep us prepared instead of winging it on the set, like we have done before. In the story board it shows how it goes from the man to the flashback, we decided to cut this later because it was time consuming. We wanted to use irony in the scenes and use dark humor to make the scenes funny.

When I was a young boy in elementary school I use to come home and watch t.v. for an hour (like scheduled) and I always seemed to like a certain show named the Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. The show was notoriously known for its dark comedy and twisted scenes. After the show was cancelled I didn't know what to watch so I turned to Youtube where I found my biggest influence in my life, Chris O'Neill. He was one of the best animators on Youtube. His humor consisted of the darkest themes paired with friendly and colorful animations. In Leo and Satan, a show by Chris O'Neill, the series features a friendly story about how a child prayed to God for a friend, and got Lucifer himself to be the candidate. This unfortunate twist creates a happy atmosphere paired with satanic and graphic scenes, which create a perfect dark comedy. Another inspiration to my mindset was Zach Hadel, another retired animator that contributed a lot to my humor. He was the owner of PsychicPebbles on Youtube where he created many parodies on society, such as in HOW TO BE A YOUTUBE FAMOUS VBLOGGER, where he made fun of many famous Youtubers (at the time). Their parody videos has led me to love dark comedies ever since laying my eyes on their channels.
Thanks to the inspiration of Zach and Chris, I believe that creating the intro for our dark comedy film will be interesting to make...

We began the storyboard today. Gabe and I began to talk about how our story would unite all of its elements to create a thriller. Halfway through the story board we kept coming up with flaws and continuity errors in our ideas, so we made a compromise at the end of the class to make our thriller a dark comedy instead. We decided this would be a better idea because me and Gabe really like dark comedies, so I did some research on some dark comedies that could be similar to our film.
I really liked the idea of a film that resembled Pulp Fiction, but within the budget that two students in high school could do. I looked up lists of dark comedies to see which ones I've seen.

Welcome to my blog

My name is Nicholas Sivaji and this is my blog about my intro for Aice Media class. My partner and I have begun brainstorming ideas for our intro. So far we have come up with many ideas however, many of them are bad. We have figured out the genre to our film will be a thriller and we began research on it. We plan to challenge ourselves by learning the elements to making the audience feel in suspense.





















Pribbenow, B. (n.d.). A Brief History of the Thriller Genre. Retrieved March 06, 2018, from https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/a-brief-history-of-the-thriller-genre