Cambridge Portfolio Project Research

Let the storytelling begin!

It's pretty evident that my partner and I have spent a lot of time choosing our genre. We went from drama, to thriller, to fantasy, and finally ended up with coming-of-age. I have analyzed the openings of some films in my previous posts (The Edge of Seventeen and Shawshank Redemption). But, I have not analyzed the movies themselves and their storytelling aspects. So, that is what I will be doing in this post with a movie that pertains to our idea for the opening.

Now one of the ideas my partner and I had was to do a coming-of-age opening about a deaf character. We received inspiration from our everyday lives: we both take ASL classes and have a lot of knowledge on the deaf community. We have not been at school to talk to our superiors about this idea yet, but we will do that tomorrow. In the meantime, I looked up other movies about deaf characters to inspire us, and realized that I completely forgot about the highly popular, and new, CODA (2021) on Apple TV+. Although it has deaf characters embedded into its plot, the story itself involves a hearing girl in an all-deaf family. This is different from our idea: a deaf character in a hearing family. Either way, we wanted to use this movie as inspiration for storytelling ideas for our film, since it became so loved for its heartwarming storyline. 

CODA is about a young, hearing girl in a deaf family who has to choose between sticking by her parents and their fishing business, or pursuing her dreams at Berklee College of Music. One aspect of the film that truly added to its success and popularity was its usage of sound and music. Music is the root of the main characters conflicts, and it shows itself in her life like in her father who enjoys the bass vibrations of rap music, or his appreciation for her singing by touching her neck. Minuscule aspects like these have made the movie popular not only in the hearing community, but also the deaf community. It shows that deaf people can appreciate music and sound, contrary to popular belief. My partner and I want to do something similar in our opening. As said before, we were drawn to the idea of using muffled/edited sound in our opening. We wanted to create an effect where the audience was "listening" to whatever the main character was listening to (i.e. the music stopping when the MC took their headphones out). When we came up with the idea of a deaf character, we were apprehensive about how to include our desires into this new plan. After watching this movie, we now see how we can approach this. We can include music, perhaps it could be one of the interests of the main character. We can also include vibration-listening examples by the MC, or include vibration-heavy music that will allow the audience to hear what a deaf person would hear. Because music is such a big aspect of any coming-of-age film, we felt it was necessary to include it, which is why we are relieved to find a way to incorporate it into our idea. 

Of course, CODA touches on the struggles of deaf people and the community as a whole. If we do this idea (we really really want to), we find it VITAL to include this somehow in our opening. We want to call onto society in some way in the 2 minutes we have, whether small or not. Even a small detail of discrimination or prejudice towards the deaf MC would be helpful in our opening, because it would set up future problems that they face in our (hypothetical) film. In the movie CODA, Ruby's family has a fishing business, and the struggles they face as deaf people are portrayed through their business. For example, intermediary forces want to install a monitor in each boat to collect data, ultimately charging them an extra $800 a month. The movie shows the discrimination towards the family in a less direct manner-- instead blatant prejudice and disgust. This is also an approach that we want to take. We obviously don't want our opening to be too dark or conflict-filled-- it IS a coming-of-age opening after all, so it should be more bright and youthful. What we can do is take a less direct approach as well, either by portraying their struggles in a subdued way or making the message more subliminal instead of blatant. Calling to society on these issues is important to us, but we still want to keep the carefree, youthfulness of a coming-of-age movie. Therefore, we want the plot to have its own substance along with deaf struggles, which we think would appeal to our targeted audiences: both hearing and deaf people, and typically teenagers.