The past week

Working on my research paper proved as difficult as I thought it would be. With friday being the deadline, I found myself stranded on thursday with sources that would love to help me out, just as soon as they're done working on their current film etc., and meanwhile I was still waiting for all my other sources to even reply to me, they still haven't. Then came my miracle! A big time movie producer / director agreed to let me call him, and so did a friend of mine in LA who's a professional actor. It wasn't as many sources as I had wanted, but between the two of them I had all of my questions answered and more! It's unfortunate that I had to write the paper in one day with 3 other papers to write, but I learned a lot by doing this and I think it was a helpful assignment.
As for my film, I've working making songs with garage band, and I'm constantly revising my script as I come up with new ideas, but I won't get into the details just yet.

emails & phone calls

So this week the assignment was to contact some industry professionals and find out some facts about the current conditions in our particular field...
I contacted an experimental actor in LA but he has yet to get back to me and I'm also waiting on a reply by a film maker about holding a telephone conference for the entire class. I have two sources in LA that I want to interview about their current experience, they are both actors and one is from Curacao just like me, so that will be my next step. But rather than focusing on this assignment I have been more preoccupied with ideas for my short film this week, so I'm falling a little behind and I need to catch up by contacting some Floridian casting directors etc. so that I can start meeting people in person and start networking. To sum it up: this week has been a mixture of failures and achievements and hopefully next week will hold more accomplishments.

Inspiration

Last week I haven't been able to do a lot of work on my project. But I did manage to come up with some specific scenes that I do not want to mention yet because I don't know which ones I want to use yet. I've mostly been thinking about how to start the film and how I want it to end and one possibility for the start is that you see the main character at work in her "studio" very intensely. As for the end I could either choose for the main character to overcome her demons, or to succumb to them and I'm leaning more towards overcoming them.

Ideas

After great consideration I have flushed my 2 ideas down the toilet. I have come up with another idea for my short film; it is going to be about an artist who can no longer produce beautiful art unless she is under the influence of alcohol. I would like to combine visual art with poetry but I haven't decided on the type of visual art yet. I want to somehow involve photography because I have some ideas about the girl, played by myself, walking on the beach sober and uninspired. She takes a couple of snap shots but when she looks at them in the camera display, she gets disappointed and discouraged to the point where she gives up. The scene then cuts to her in her apartment, drinking, looking at pictures and maybe putting together a collage, or maybe she goes back out to make sunset pictures and this time she likes them.

The main point that I want to bring across is that she needs to drink to get inspired, yet her drinking is becoming a problem because it is making her depressed, which works in favor for her art but not her health.
I also want to create a solitary feel to the film. There will be scenes with dialogue, between her and her friends and boyfriend, probably to cancel plant mostly. There is also something going on between her and her boyfriend, maybe she has affairs when she drinks, or maybe the guy threatens to leave her because she's always absent. She might also have phone conversations with her family in which she pretends to be perfectly happy and normal. I want to try to display her inner artsy mind. I want to try to show the viewers how she sees and interpret objects and situations. She loves nature and focuses mostly on that, she is also a vegetarian which I may or may not care to display, but basically a hippie tree hugger type. I still working on the character though.

I'm going to use music to enhance the mood I'm looking for in each scene and I need research copyright laws for songs. I'm also planning on shooting mostly on public territory so I don't have to worry about permits.
Come monday I will have a more thought out plan for this movie, but that's it for now.