Critiques/Changes

Hi blog!

On Tuesday, Renn, Vicky, and I went up to Ms. Stoklosa to ask for some guidance regarding our plotline. We showed her our script (you can see it in a previous post that was dedicated to the creation of it), and she did think our storyline could have some cool different paths that we could go with it, so I am going to discuss some of those really quick.

Love Interest (Michael):

So, the main "conflict" of our film is that Dahlia has a crush on Michael and she feels like her best friend, Melia, is ruining that shot for her. When we were having our group discussion, Ms. Stoklosa was not a big fan of our conflict being based around a man, as it did not seem like a very creative way to go about having two very close friends fight. We 100% agreed with her, especially since all three of us are very passionate about what we create, and it seems like the easy way out. In the beginning, it felt like the best option, since we could focus more on the techniques and not worry so much about the plot, but we decided that it is more important to have a strong, unique plan for the plot, which may be more work, but having that on top of great technique, we will be that much prouder of our results at the end of the day.

Tom Clarity:

So, if you noticed, there is a "character" named tom that gets older throughout the film, and Tom's age sets an understanding of how much time has passed. Tom is the plant. In our discussion, it was brought up that who Tom is wasn't clear, so to combat this, we are going to take a sticker that says "Hi, my name is" and write tom on it, and put it on the pot of the plant. This also allows us to show Dahlia's handwriting, which allows the audience to further understand a more quirky side of the character while still making the Tom aspect more clear. Instead of buying multiple plants in different stages, we decided to buy a fully grown plant and cutting it when it needs to be smaller.

Argument:

This somewhat ties into the whole Michael dilemma, but it was also mentioned that the argument felt depthless, and a bit petty for two girls who are supposedly best friends. I did agree with this in a way, however I do think that the way it was written was really well done. Renn wrote most of the script while Vicky and I looked back over it and made several tweaks, but I thought the character was very clear, the conflict was the main concern among this comment. We also decided it would be a better idea to call it a confrontation instead of conflict, since we are getting rid of the whole Michael side plot, and made the main disagreement based on how Dahlia is always busy.

Ending:

The ending will most certainly be up for interpretation, as we all agreed we wanted to leave the audience to sit with a clear feeling. Our problem was that we had so many potential connections, and we didn't know which one we wanted to convey the most, so how can we expect the audience to walk away from the short film feeling a certain way when we don't set what we especially wanted it to be.

We are so grateful to have gotten these figured out, and we feel much more confident going into production based on the notes. Here is a photo that Vicky sent us, as she wrote down the notes on her phone during the group conversation.