Representing the Deaf community

Accurately representing the deaf community as a whole in our opening is of utmost importance.  Although we are just high school students, we feel inclined to pay homage to the community, otherwise our idea would be futile. My partner and I are both in ASL class, as I mentioned before. Because of this, we've been exposed to a lot of knowledge and information on deaf people and ASL. This definitely played a part in our decision to do this idea, because we know so much about the topic. In class, we watched numerous videos and documentaries on the lives of deaf people, and one topic that causes much conflict in the community is cochlear implants. Cochlear implants are small electronic devices that electrically stimulate the cochlear nerve (nerve for hearing). Simply put, they're electrical machinery that allow deaf people to hear to a certain degree. We toyed with the idea of the main character in our film having one of these implants, that way they would talk orally. But we realized that, from what we learned, some members of the deaf community see the implants as a form of oppression, taking away their most prized cultural aspect: they're signed language. We also didn't know how we were going to include a cochlear implant in the opening because they are very VERY expensive, we wouldn't be allowed one besides medical necessity, and a dupe would look too unrealistic (could be portrayed mockery as well). In having a character who is deaf and uses ASL as their primary form of communication, the deaf community would receive the most raw form of representation, because signed language is the essence of their culture. 

 

Above is the trailer for a 2000 documentary my partner and I watched, called Sound and Fury, and it showcases the deaf community's divisive feelings on cochlear implants. The deaf parents in the film don't want their deaf child to receive the implant, like other deaf members, but the hearing family members believe they're making the wrong decision. The deaf community's feelings on this topic play into our goals for representation in this opening. Obviously, we want to show media representation of deaf people who use signed language, which has been pretty uncommon up until the recent release of Coda (2021). We also want to represent deaf children in hearing families who have to suffer from divisive ideas on their deafness, which is very prominent but not talked about enough.

One problem I briefly mentioned in my previous posting was our conflicts with casting. Having a deaf actor would be ideal for us, because of the representation it would bring, but unfortunately our environment and school does not allow for this. Because we are choosing to have the main character sign (not talk), we need to cast someone who is pretty much fluent in sign language. We both are in ASL 3, which definitely helps our chances of finding an eligible candidate. So instead of finding a deaf actor, which is almost impossible, we are looking at our classmates to see who can act. We already have a few candidates, most of whom are in drama class as well. This is highly important because drama students in ASL are another level of emotive and expressive when signing, which is what we need in order to showcase the most accurate representation. This may seem like a lot considering they'll barely be signing in our opening, but we want to make sure the few lines they DO sign are accurate and a positive representation of the deaf community.

Outlining our opening

Our idea finally got approved! Now, we can go full-force into developing our opening and storyline. So, we're going with the idea of doing a coming-of-age movie about a deaf character. We want to create a "typical" coming-of-age opening, but provide tiny details about the character's eventual conflicts (external and internal) they will face. Our story will be about a deaf character who's been mainstreamed (deaf term for being put into "regular" schools instead of deaf schools). They are isolated/protected by their family, particularly mother, but they befriend another deaf student who transfers from out of town. The conflict will be the main character becoming enlightened of a life outside of restraint (that the secondary character showed them), and how their family reacts. We want their relationship to be platonic so the focus can be o the main character's development and acceptance of their differences in society. In the opening, we plan to develop the main character and their personality by showing their room. We also will include music that pertains to their personality to further develop the character. We will introduce their sibling (who is "perfect") as being opposite the MC in terms of personality. Then, we plan to include minimal "dialogue" (signing), to let the audience know the character is deaf. Here is a basic outline of our opening:

1. Starts with black screen (a ___ production)

1. Music beings playing while screen is still black

2. Sibling getting ready. Show parts of the room, typical coming of age (like the example we watched).

3. Cuts to MC getting ready and sound/music is muffled (indicate loss of hearing). Sibling comes behind MC and talks to them but MC does not turn around. 

1. Close-up shots of MC's room: posters, record player, pictures with family, decorations

2. Show extreme close-up of flier (football game that night/any public outing for school)

4. Sibling comes into MC's rooms and turns off record player, music also stops playing (synchronous sound)

5. Sibling tells MC they're going to leave for school (??)

6. MC goes into kitchen with flier and shows it to mom. Mom refutes the idea, tells them to be home straight after school (show how protective mother is).

7. MC is upset but hides it; walks out and slams the front door. Title shows up when they are walking/getting into the car.

8. Sibling and MC in the car (??) Music is still playing (asynchronous).

9. Getting out at school…maybe or we end before that

This is just a basic outline of our opening. We have a broad idea of how we want it to go, now we will being storyboarding and tweaking our outline as we go. As seen in the question marks, there are certain parts where we don't know which direction to go in. Signing is a big part of this opening and story, BUT we don't want to bore our audience by constantly having to read subtitles. To help this problem, my partner and I will begin the casting process soon, so we can have an actor that will be emotive and exciting to watch when signing. Casting is essential to this opening and we will detail this process and decision later. But because our casting is so limited and specific, we will have to tweak our story after casting; so we cannot determine whether or not the main character is male or female until after we cast, same for their sibling. 

For now, here are some things that we definitely know we are doing for the opening:

• We will include the credits as we show close-up shots of the character's room(s) and content of their room(s).
• Our title will appear at a wide shot of the main character walking to the car.
• The appearance of the title will be synced with the music we choose.
• The music will cut/be muffled in a certain part

Music, music, music

Unfortunately, we had a substitute teacher today (the universe is not on our side), so we could not get our teachers approval for our idea. That means we won’t be able to get our story approved until Friday, and because of this, we didn’t want to finalize anything today without this approval. So, this left us in a difficult situation, because we knew we needed to be going further in our research, but this was limited if our idea was not solidified. But, we were able to find something productive to do today, and something that is essentially vital to our opening: music. 

Like I’ve said countless times, we really want to focus on audio and sound effects as well as visual components (but mostly audio because of our low budget). So, my partner and I took all class today to find music for our opening. We also came up with character backgrounds, but not too in-depth because we wanted to finalize our story first. We wanted to find music that symbolizes and represents our characters personality. We want our main character to like more grunge/rock music than their siblings who enjoy more indie/pop music. We thought we could emphasize their different personalities through music in the opening, when we envision to show them each getting ready. We both wanted to look for royalty free music first before delving into our favorite songs, simply because the emailing process to get the rights to use the song would be a bear. Luckily, my partner found a website called uppbeat.io that had a vast library of royalty free music in countless genres. So, we went searching, and although it took a while, we found two songs we really like. They are symbolic of the characters differing personalities, and we pretty much have an idea on how to incorporate them into the opening. But, we will still continue casually searching for songs in case we find something EVEN better. 

These are the two songs we found on the royalty free music site. The only problem we are encountering with this site is we may have to pay money to download these songs, either that or purchase a subscription to the actual site. we obviously don't want to do this. So, another option we have is to screen record using our iPhone and save that video as an MP4. This is a little less professional, granted, but it has the same result as the first option, and we will only use this if we cannot find a way to download the songs without paying. 

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.

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!).

Cambridge Portfolio Brainstorming

Finalizing our genre

So we've done it! We've finally decided on our genre. My partner and I will be doing a coming-of-age film. We are more comfortable with this genre and from most of the ideas we pitched, we saw a trend: they all revolved around the coming-of-age genre. So, in class today, we began to watch coming of age movie openings to understand more of their conventions. We knew we wanted to do something with sound and music, and so focused on that aspect while watching examples.

Now last post, I talked about the conventions of audio/sound in drama movies, such as Shawshank Redemption. Because we have nixed the idea of doing a drama opening, we had to analysis a new example. So, I watched the film opening of 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)-- linked below. In this opening, the director focuses on developing the character, Kat Statford, and her environment. Her actions in response to the girls helps develop her unique personality, and differentiates herself from usual coming-of-age main characters-- something we want to do in our opening. The film's opening also uses a popular rock song, "Bad Reputation", which helps to develop the young, rebellious tone. My partner and I want do something similar to this: we want to use a song that will add to the mood of the scene and be a representation of our character's personality. 

We also really like the stylization of the credits. The drawn-on credits adds to the youthful, rebellious tone and relates directly to the coming-of-age genre. We can do something similar to this if we choose too. I have animation experience in After Effects, and have done draw-on animations before, so this is something we can incorporate as an option in our planning. The only problem with this approach is that the process is extremely tedious because you have to go frame-by-frame and write out the entire name each time. This will definitely be time consuming, so if we choose to do this, we need to decide early-on. 

Because of our chosen genre (coming-of-age), we now have a better idea of our target audience for our opening. Coming-of-age movies typically have a target audience of teenagers, usually from ages 12 to 18. This is because these people are in the stage of their life when they are going into adulthood, coming of age so to say. With our young target audience, we will have to cater the aspects of our opening to their interests. For interest, we can choose a well-known, popular song to include in the opening. We can also write our story to include terminology or everyday items that are known to teenagers; this will further appeal to them and gain their interest in watching our production.

Cambridge Portfolio Project Research

Brainstorming ideas on sound

So, my partner and I have narrowed down our genres further to only coming of age and drama/thriller. We eliminated fantasy because we didn't have any ideas coming to mind, and after looking at examples of fantasy movies, realized that they require a lot of effects and creative storytelling-- things we can't really do within our budget. But now, we have to come up with our stories for the coming of age and drama/thriller genres. Our plan is to brainstorm different stories for each one, and choose the best one (easier said than done). Now, we don't have concrete ideas as of right now, but we both have an idea of specific aspect we want to include in our opening. For example, we want to make use of the audio of the opening and use some unique sound effects. For the coming of age movie, this is how we picture incorporating audio:

'The main character is walking down the street wearing headphones, and we are able to hear their music. Then after an abrupt event (like them almost getting hit by a car), the music cuts out completely-- like their music pausing on their phone.'

This is just one example of how we want to maximize audio effects. Some other ways we can do so is by adding plugins on After Effects to make the audio muffled, or to boost the bass. We can also add reverb or distortion, though we most likely will stick to matching the audio with our plot. If we plan on doing a coming of age movie, we want to use these audio techniques because music is something that is universal, especially in the lives of teenagers. So, we figured we would stay on target by using audio effects-- in terms of using accurate conventions of a coming of age movie. With a thriller/drama, however, the audio would be a bit different. 

Opening scene of Shawshank Redemption (1994)

I watched the opening scene of Shawshank Redemption (1994) as a way to see the conventions of openings of drama movies, and how they use sound and audio techniques. In this, the director relies on non-diegetic sound. The narration is emphasized in the beginning, and this is followed by swelling music as we get to see the setting from a bird's-eye-perspective. Similarly, my partner and I plan to use background music in our opening, regardless of the genre. We want to find music that is already created, so we will either look for royalty free music online, or we will find another artist's music. But, we will have to email the artist's production company to get access to use the music, which is a bit of a challenge considering the possibility of them just not answering us. These are our two options, since neither of us can produce our own music. So, we are starting to look at music while we finalize our genre; that way we can plan accordingly if the company does not answer us, or if we cannot find any royalty free music we like.