CCR Script

Since I already wrote a reflection last week, I am going to talk about my CCR script and filming.

I decided to do a mix of both an audio of me talking with powerpoint slides and movie clips with also videos of me talking into the camera. I wrote a full script and while filming some parts I copy and pasted my script into a free teleprompter website to help me read off the screen.

Here is my script!!!

Hi, my name is Samantha Surico and I created the film opening to my new movie “Spiraling” with my partner Federica Briones. Spiraling is about a young girl in high school who is going through a lot of struggles with her friends that is later uncovered in the movie. The opening shows our character, Serena packing a bag and running away while her mom is home unaware of what's going on upstairs.

Spiraling falls under the thriller genre. The thriller genre is best defined as a movie that can evoke a strong emotion of intrigment, suspense or excitement. The protagonist, in this case Serena Thorpe, would be the character going against everyone or somehow feeling as if the world is against them.Film openings alone for Thriller movies start off causing high levels of suspense and already having the audience intrigued. Take the movie “US” for example, the movie opening consists of rabbits and intense chanting. Our film opening works to create suspense through the intense music choice, fast scenes, and parallel editing. Throughout the opening we want viewers to be wondering if she’s going to get caught.One genre convention we are challenging would be giving the protagonist a limited amount of time to act. We chose to do this to show how this was a spur of the moment decision rather than a well- thought out plan. Serena represents a lot of teenagers today. Easily confused kids who let their emotions get the best of them.From the start of the film we can tell this wasn't a thoroughly thought out plan and Serena is easily doing things in the moment without thinking of the next step. The mom is challenging the average motherly stereotype. Coming home from work, work attire, making dinner, and sitting down on the couch to watch the news and relax.Throughout the film we are trying to represent stereotypical families that look perfect from the outside but experience real struggles.

Our target audience is females and males ages 17-26. We went with this target audience because the average target audience for thriller movies are males ages 18-30. We brought it down a little bit and directed it towards females too because of the strong female leads in this movie. Which already challenges the thriller genre, as most thrillers star a male.But there are also thriller movies that represent strong female leads such as Gone Girl.Most young adults consume media through streaming.We believe our film engages with our audience since it’s about a young girl dealing with a lot of struggles and many people could relate or resonate with her.We plan on making our film available to our audience by posting it on our youtube account therefore anyone who wants access to it can view it.

This was a long process but we finally made it to this point. We started off stuck, unable to come up with an idea when finally we took inspiration from Gone Girl but with all the changes made you wouldn't even know how we got this idea because it's nothing like it anymore.We started off very confused and had a whole different storyline. We were originally planning to have Serena run away but make it look as if she got kidnapped so her parents wouldn’t be disappointed or angry with her for leaving. Once we realized that was something we wouldn’t be able to portray in a two minute film opening we changed our storyline into something that would make more sense. Once we created our storyboard we really got ourselves together and finally had a real vision. Filming went very well. We experienced a few difficulties but nothing we couldn't work with. We had to deal with our reflections, glares and a few bloopers because of course this was a very dramatic opening so sometimes it was hard to get a scene without laughing but it caused no problems. The room we chose to film in had two large mirrors so throughout the filming process we were constantly ducking and trying to move around as fast as possible to avoid being shot in the mirror but at the end of the day there were a few shots that we needed to retake.Previous projects we have completed helped us too. The one that helped me the best was when we were creating a movie pitch and had to create characters. This helped us build Serena's character.From the outfits to the smeared makeup I really believe we were able to achieve the look we were going for.Overall the whole project went smoothly and we were able to successfully create the opening we had imagined. 

So for filming we kept it simple. We used an Iphone 11 to film. We mostly had hand held shots because a few were tracking shots, close ups, zoom ins, etc. For the still shots we were able to prop the phone up against the window sill. We originally planned on using a ring light but we decided natural lighting would look better because we were filming at night and we wanted to make sure that was clear to the viewers. We then moved the videos to our laptops where we imported them into adobe premiere pro and started our editing. Editing took a lot of cropping, focusing, and adding effects to. Editing on Adobe premiere pro went smoothly. This gave us the chance to crop the scenes and create parallel editing in our film. At first we thought it was gonna be impossible to figure out but it turned out easier then we anticipated.We also used Canva to create our production company logo which helped us to successfully create a typewriter look.Throughout the project our blog posts really helped me stay on track with what we had done and our next steps.

This project has helped me a lot with working on long term projects, bettering communication skills and team work. This gave me the opportunity to be more open and experiment with my ideas and change them.Having this much time helped us create a story and then realize it wasn't what we wanted and we still had more than enough time to make it the way we wanted. If I could do anything differently I would work on my time management. I was able to manage my time better than in previous projects but procrastination was a very big problem in the beginning of the project. Next time I want to make sure I can stay on top of my work throughout the whole duration of my project.