Cambridge Portfolio Project Research

We're getting somewhere... maybe

Now that we've decided on a genre, we're starting the tedious process of coming up with an idea for our opening. Coming of age movies, according to Wikipedia, "focus on the psychological and moral growth or transition of a protagonist from youth to adulthood". Simply put, we will have to focus on a teenager transitioning from youth to adulthood. This is important to our process of developing the story because our story will have to revolve around this fact; we will have to stay on theme throughout the entire opening. Now, my partner and I are brainstorming... a lot. But, we are running into some problems with the plot process,  like:

1. Developing our character and their personality in a 2 minute time frame
2. Creating a story that differentiates from the typical coming-of-age movie, but still stays relevant to the genre
3. Finding music (since we want to base our opening around the use of music)

For the first problem, my partner and I are worried about being able to detail our character's personality in such a short amount of time-- especially when we also have to include credits (meaning limited dialogue). We feel compelled to develop the character because it is something commonly seen in coming-of-age movies. For instance, in The Edge of Seventeen (2016), Nadine's character is introduced and developed as being emotional and snarky through dialogue with her teacher. So, we wanted to do something similar to this; working around the short time frame, we will likely focus on mise-en-scene (i.e. the character's wardrobe, hair/makeup, and bedroom decor) and the character's actions as a way to achieve this development in 2 minutes. 

This is an example of an opening that we are inspired by (as mentioned before). We want to do something similar to how Nadine's character was developed. Her personality was essentially shown to the audience in a few minutes, which gives us hope for our time-frame. Even though we don't want to rely on dialogue as much as this scene does, it is a great example for us to use when we start planning our story in more detail. 

As for the second point, my partner and I have come up with an idea (though we are not 100% positive we will go down this route). We thought about doing a coming-of-age movie based around a deaf character. This will definitely add a unique factor compared to other movies of this genre, and will allow us to stay relevant because we can keep the same outline of the genre: developing the character, introducing their struggles, and ending with them persevering or finding their "happy ending". This idea came to us because my partner and I are both in ASL 3 at school-- meaning we are very involved with sign language and learning about deaf people. Since it is something we know so well, we feel we can pay homage to the Deaf community with this idea. However, one problem we may face is casting. Deaf students are unfortunately limited at our school, so we would have to use a hearing actor. We worry that this lack of representation will undermine the awareness we want to bring on the struggles of deaf people. In order to combat this-- because it is an idea we really want to do-- we will ask our superiors whether or not this will be a problem, and ask around if we have deaf students we can use in the film. We can also meet with the ASL teacher, who is deaf, and get her opinion on this matter.

With the third problem we have faced, we are not as concerned about music at the moment. Yes, we wanted to base the shots and timing in our opening around music, and yes, this would mean we would have to find music soon. But, we are more focused on our actual idea first, as we should. Both of us are avid music listeners (we ARE teenagers), so throughout the week we have been casually noting songs we think could possibly work. Then, later on, we will revisit this list and start the process of emailing production companies for permission to use their songs (if we choose to). But overall, we are just excited that we are getting somewhere (finally!).