Without further ado, here it is, The Scourge.
As a google drive, it was too big.
This link features both the short film for The Scourge and the postcard (I guess there was a bit more ado)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WBvw0ZHCA9YQ-ISlpEH1DVODslJXSsr4?usp=drive_link
Alongside that, here is the link to the Instagram page for The Scourge
https://www.instagram.com/thescourgeshortfilm/
Well, here we are, my next blog will be the finished short film (along side other stuff) and then we will be done.
Here I am now, being forced to reflect on my work, and while usually I would make a snarky joke saying that I am being "pinned down and forced to think" or something, this time I really just want to show how happy I am that I got to do this. I wasn't perfect with it, hell I missed the mark by a fucking continent, I mean sorry a fricking continent, too much profanity, looks bad. I am not the perfect artiste I want to be deep down, just like how calfism isn't the perfect religion that will fufill all of Otto's dreams. Like religion, art is messy, it has a lot of moving parts that tend to clash against each other, they require a lot of effort to be successfull and a real internal belief in what they stand for. I missed a lot of what I was supposed to do for this, and this isn't me making excuses or getting down on my knees and apologizing for it, it's me accepting that it says a lot about me as an artist. I may not have done a perfect job uh, job wise, but dammit did I not let that take away from me at my art.
Don't get me wrong, theres a lot that I would have done differently if I could, so many shots make little sense and the audio turned out to be a fucking nightmare to work with, but theres also a lot that I really like the results of. I don't see the rougher parts of my short as a being necessarilly problems but charming little mistakes that give the whole thing a B-movie feel, you might say that's cheap and unearned, I say yeah, but it's my baby and I choose to love it.
I am so grateful for the team I had, we all worked together to make something different, even if you wind up not liking what we did it will stand out against everything else as this weird little hilarious piece of religious commentary with some great god damn music. I have to give a lot of flowers to Emi, to say she pulled her weight would be an understatement to the ant levels of pulling weight she did. She put her whole heart and soul into this which is not something I can say about everybody I've worked with and I just can't hate a finished product that has that behind it. Now I don't wanna make it seem like I didn't do anything, I'd go as far to say I did a lot. The editing phase would have actually have given me a panic attack but the Mrs. Stoklosa told me to restart my computer and take a second to breath, and admitablly that second restored my breath. I combed all of weston driving us back and forth and back and forth, the route to my house, Emi's house, and the church we filmed at is like a triangle in my mind due to how used to it I became. I wrote the script (Emi changing a few parts) I had the idea, I edited about half of it, and I even acted, I don't want my subpar (at best) work in these blogs reflect on my character, I had teammates who's grades relied on me and I provided. I haven't given Andrew any credit yet and thats unfair. He wound up in situations where either he didn't have as much to do directly or his work wound up going unused, he came up with the original design for our postcard which we loved but then we realized it wouldn't work and had to redo it completely, this design what going to be partially in the short but it also wound up cut. Still if it weren't for that original postcard - which he made early into the production - the branding would have ended up with a completely different look, so I have to be thankful. Plus he really came out of his shell while filming and acting, which I appreaciate as someone who has learnt to be more social and out-there due to making such odd films.
I am geniuenly so sad knowing that this is my last rodeo around here, my last blog, my last project, my last collaboration. I will forever hold this project to my heart, it's a combination of so many moving parts it's hard not to appreciate. To show my love, I will be hanging up the only prop I kept which I did not already own in my wall, this calfism poster. It will be inbetween my taxi driver poster and my door.
So goodbye beautiful people, and don't forget, CALFISM4LIFE!
The short film The Scourge is an absurdist dark-comedy about a girl named Otto falling into the satanist religious crusade of a mysterious mad-man. The Scourge takes its unorthodox premise and delivers a bizarre story that warns of the evils of religion and those who use it as a means to their ends.
The Scourge was inspired by other media as unconventional as it is. All of the films, shows, and videogames that lead to Scourge used comedy as a form of critique of a common metanarrative, the 2014 videogame, The Binding Of Isaac, inspired the short at both an aesthetic and thematic level. It uses its silly premise of a child in a dungeon-crawler inspired by video games like The Legend Of Zelda to critique the metanarrative of a typical christian household .The game depicts religion as neither a good nor bad thing, just as an incredibly powerful and influential idea that can turn people against their own family, that theme was carried into The Scourge in a similar fashion.
At a visual and musical level, The Scourge was inspired by Isaac’s aesthetic, that being the look and sound of the “metal subculture,” one which none of the crew was very familiar with, but metal has shaped the way modern audiences think about the “satanist aesthetic." Sharp and red lettering for the title and credits, loud metal music, and rough and crude visuals make up a large chunk of The Scourge, parts of the short having so much grain and color distortion that they appear like something straight out of a 90’’s skate-video. The visuals invoke this imagery in a semi-satirical way due to how ridiculous and silly the content of the short are, the parody elements serving not to mock but to juxtapose.
The comedy aspects of the short bled heavily into its marketing, audiences got a taste of what was in store. We made an Instagram page for the short and sprinkled it with personality carried over from the short. The page was littered with behind-the-scenes footage and bloopers - a lot of the crew goofing off on set - and short funny clips taken from the short meant to entice audiences. One small way that the tone for the page was set was in its profile picture, while most teams working on the portfolio-projected opted to make the profile be the piece’s title, we chose instead to use a piece of imagery from the short itself,, the wonky pentagram Otto draws. This symbol serves as a pretty accurate visual metaphor for the film, it's a religious piece that strives to be wacky, and the first impression a lot of the audience gets from the short being that symbol shows it isn’t striving to be a conventional film but one more focused on being funny.
One very silly way we connected to the audience was by having an in-universe blog - which is mentioned passingly in the short - be accessible to the audience. The film’s target audience is small, the short uses comedy vindictive to the religious groups it parodies and these blogs take that to an extreme that can be higher than the actual film. The blogs are short yet funny excerpts that are not meant to be taken seriously and that expand on some of the background details of the film, rewarding audiences that went out of their way to find the blog through a post in the Instagram page. This specific post also expanded on the branding, it’s a silly post in which the in-universe character who wrote the blogs “found the sign-in to the account” and is now promoting his beliefs. The post has the absurdist comedic edge, the character claiming he’d spent hours guessing random passwords until he eventually found the right one, but also having a look that was ingrained with the short by then, the lettering of the caption being “demonic” with scratched out words, and the image used being of an in-universe business-card with the link to the blog in black-and-white. Problematically, this “business-card” was eventually cut from the film, which partially breaks its purpose and seems a bit out of place.
The black-and-white imagery was used throughout most of our instagram posts, specifically those depicting the cast and crew. The rest of the social media utilized deep blacks and crimson reds which were very visually striking when used with the black and white photos.. All of the posts had graphics that were sharp and spikey, like a red frame around what would otherwise be a regular video. All of these ideas were carried into our postcard; from the red graphics, to the black-and-white photos of the cast. We even implemented some comedy to it, having a silly little drawing of a devil tail near a “devilish” character in the short and little piece of text saying “scan me!” next to the QR code.
The themes of The Scourge were divisive, to say the least, amongst the team. All three of us came from different walks of life that led to all of us having different readings of our own text. My intention with Scourge was to depict religion as an idea carried by spite and opportunism over love or belief. The main character is someone bored with catholic and christian ideas and switches to a new belief seemingly just because she is promised power over it, the character that introduces her to the belief has a hatred of religion and a want to control those around him, the only catholic in the story, a young priest, uses religion to shame those that deny it and try to leave it, and the main character’s sister is a victim of religion who suffers due to supporting a different religion she believed stood against the one which hurt her, only to meet a worse fate from the new one.
I'm calling the group meeting the sandboc because it's like a sandbox of ideas! Look I can only spend so long thinking of S words. So lets meet all the little kiddies who are gonna be chowing down sand of ideas in the sandbox!
I didn't write as much about myself as I was told, my main take away as you can see is to use more animation graphics, now that we have the story more fleshed out this advice will apply a little less but we still will have several animated graphics!
Luckly, Emi worked like lightning! She got a very fleshed out storyboard out, and now I can for sure say, I don't know what we would've done without this storyboard. I usually skip the storyboard step when I make short films, it usually goes not great, I've learnt over and over again to appreaciate this seemingly small part of the pre-production, I can now say that the storyboard at least halved how long we took on filming.
like a fart in the wind, I have NOT VANISHED and have returned with my bloggy know-how. I wrote the script, the story was my idea and im gonna be credited as the main writer so it makes sense. Now it took me quite a while to finish the script, partially due to complications at my home, paritally due to college prep stuff, partially due to a whole other short film that I will likely talk about at least once in my blog, but almost entirely due to laziness on my end, self awareness may be a good coping mechanism for being bad at your passion but it's not the script SO LET'S GET ON TO IT!
Here is the first version of the script, it sucks, plain and simple. I have a method for writing my scripts, sometimes I can just waste an entire day of brainstorming by not writing anything down and sometimes I write a 22 page script on a train that directly influenced this one! However, I could not get the juices flowing, and added with all of my half-assed procrasination excuses with an added layer of uncertainty as to what we wanted the story to be lead to, well this. I'd love to pick and laugh at how much of a failure this first draft was (Sidenote, at first I thought this script would be so good I wouldn't even need another draft, hilarious I know.) I literally wrote "ensue montage," my sister taught me how to write a montage in a screenplay and I just forgot, so instead of asking her I just hoped for the best. Theres a lack of real characters and motivation, there is basically no rising action, there are technically 3 acts but more accurately there are 3 scenes with the vague notion of there being montages, overall this script was not going to work.
Next draft was pretty good though. I will NOT take sole credit for this draft being a vast improvement from the last, that credit goes to my whole team who all huddled around and chipped out a much better version of the story. Now to toot my own horn, I was the one who came up with all the new scenes but it was a group effort to figure out what we wanted to flesh out which each scene, mainly characters. My first script does a terrible job at showing why Otto even chooses to join the evil, spooky, calf religion, however the new scene introducing Mable better shows this with subtler and more fufilling dialogue, along side smaller additional changes.
Now another version of the script was made but it's almost identical to the first so I'll save it for later, for now I'll say something wicked this way comes!
Research is hard, google hasn’t been a reliable source for anything since its logo changed fonts and they started celebrating lesser-known holidays. Through osmosis, however, I have scrounged out the three short films I need, all of them landing in or around the dark comedy genre. Let's get this over with.
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Media text: Huge
Social media tool: Instagram
Description of types of posts:
Description of how branding is developed (or not):
The page shows a focus on what the short is about (and what a lot of audience members will watch it for), that being the gender dysphoria aspect, social media is already meant to connect with audiences at a personal level so discussing the reason that the short is even being made directly on the social media is smart.
Analysis of how you will use this to develop your own social media presence:
I really like them devoting posts to specific cast and crew members, I could totally see us do a collection of “meet the crew” kind of posts that introduce the three of us.
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Media text: Murdershewanted
Social media tool: instagram
Description of types of posts:
Description of how branding is developed (or not):
The comedic quotes are what really helps demonstrate the short's edge and tone along side dragging potential audiences who find the quote's funny and weird in. The font used for the logo of the short is also loud and agressive with it's pink neon lights and white text.
Analysis of how you will use this to develop your own social media presence:
I actually really like this idea of using quotes from the short to show it's comedic angle, I think - since our short is more absurdist - I might make up fake quotes that become progressively more absurd as time goes on.
Media text: Loco
Social media tool: instagram
Description of types of posts:
Description of how branding is developed (or not):
The bright neon green text in the title's font sticks out immediatley and hence they stick cloesly to this aesthetic in every post building a sense of cohesion while also being incredibly over the top in it's matrix-like aesthethic. The videos made by the director are all very comedic and work with the shorts tone.
Analysis of how you will use this to develop your own social media presence:
I really want the satanist aesthetic to stick out in most if not all of our posts, deep, dark, crimson reds and blacks, cool satanic imagery and text with sharp angular fonts, helps attract a more targeted audience too.
RICK AND MORTY
One of the most iconic gags in the show is on episode 8 season 4, "vat of acid." In this episode Rick makes Morty a device which can save a specific period of time and take it's user back to it like loading a save file in a video game or like in the finale of futurama before HULU made the 2 most forgettable seaons of television since arrested development. Now when Morty gets the device instead of showing what he does with it were shown a montage of him using it. At first Morty does all the typical things youi'd expect a 14 year old boy to do, asking his crush out, stealing a car, trying every free sample at an ice cream place, that kind of thing. Until eventually the montage's loud and exciting music turns nice and calm and we see Morty, the usually timid and awkard lame 14 year old, suddenly gets the confidence to hold the door open for a random girl. The two hit it off and the montage now turns into a cliche, cutesy, love montage, there is no dialogue, we're just shown the two falling in love for each other, until their relationship starts to sour and the two nearly break up, again all of this is still in a montage. Eventually Morty apologizes and tries to sweeten the relationship by getting the two of them a flight to some vacation place. The montage continues until it again is completely turned around as the plane the two are on crashes into the artic. The two survive the crash and have to do what they can to keep surviving, lighitng fires, huddling up, eating vegan leather shoes (which is a great visual gag), and eventually eating other passanger. Morty looks at the device and realizes he can go back to right before the two met and save them from this hell, but he doesn't, he knows that was months ago and he'd lose the woman he loves so he ventures high up a mountain to try and get a signal and call for help. Now the montage shifts again to be somewhat more emotional and heroic as we are shown Morty's trek, nearly dying several times until eventually he reaches the top and just barely calls 911 before fainting. Suddenly, we cut to the hospital, the music becomes cheery and the two have survived. Morty's family throws the two a welcome back party, and while they are all watching the TV Morty's idiot father Jerry reaches for the control remote, accidentally grabbing the device and turning time all the way back to before Morty met this girl to which he tries aimlessly explaining to her what had happened and being pepper sprayed, the music switching back to the one playing at the very start of the montage.
Now I spent a lot of time explaning that montage because it's genius. This relationship or this girl are never mentioned again in the episode or the show, the only reason it's in there from a story perspective is to give Morty a reason to get tired of the device and return it to Rick, thereby moving the plot along. Plus in the actual show Rick and Morty much more bizarre things happen to Morty than him being trapped in the Artic and his genius, space traveling grandpa not being able to find him after he crashes into the artic would normally be a plot hole, however you don't question it here because of how absurd it is, it's more absurd for the audience that the characters act like people and go on normal people adventures, not like the wacky sci-fi characters they are. This kind of humor which makes reality seem absurd speaks to me in volumes, I love it and WILL be incorperating it to my short.
SMILING FRIENDS
CRUELTY SQUAD
THE BINDING OF ISAAC
Now, that's all pretty fucked up, but the comedy element comes in the fact that the game is all meant to take place in a child's mind, Isaac is actually just imagining that he is having an adventure, so you have a lot of very silly material that fills the game. One reoccuring piece of imagery in the game is that of poop, poop is actually a reoccuring piece of imagery in every videogame by the developer, Edmund Mcmillen, who's made a lot of beloved indie classics, classics that do in fact feature a lot of poop. There are items based off of poop, enemies based off of poop, poop bosses, poop obstacles, a whole character in the game is based off of throwing literal shit at his enemies, however once you unlock that enemy you start to realize there is a dark side as to why you see so many references to the brown stuff (if you dont mind me calling it that). See Isaac's mom never went into his room and ended his life, he likely tought it would happen and went to hide in his toy chest, and in there he suffocated to death while comforting himself with stories and adventures, which is what the actual game is. The chracter you unlock is called by the game's community as "Blue Baby," being a reference to one of Mcmillen's old games, the character is just a blue version of Isaac with X's in his eyes and you find him laying inside of a giant chest, the implication is that this is you playing as a blue, suffocated Isaac, and the reason you throw shit at your adversaries is because of the myth that once you die you shit your pants. The reason that the game is because isaac was likely thinking, right before he died, that he was going to shit himself as he was dying. Now that, is a messed-up joke.
Now that long example I gave was just meant to give you an idea of how the game rolls, it's not scared to pull any punches and that's a big part of what I wanna bring to my story. I love the dark, depressing mood that you feel when you play though the game as if it's aware of how dark it is and it doesn't care about how uncomfortable that makes the audience, it leaves you to just instinctivley laugh, almost as if that's the only reaction you can really have. Of course those themes of religion and in how they can traumatize a child will be heavily applied to my short film, Otto's sister will have past trauma from being a lesbian and being forced to go to conversion camp. I think the way the game shows you Isaac's perspective, thereby hiding the darker truth behind it, makes the story very interesting, it forces you as an audience member to piece the pieces of his life together.
THE SUBSTANCE
The Substance came out in 2024 and took the world by storm, being nominated for multiple oscars, including best picture and director. Just like Isaac, it's a pretty clear metaphor for a kind of worship, not the religious kind however, but the material one.
The Substance picks apart at the material, patriarchal, and most times disgusting ways in which women are given and taken influence in hollywood. Demi Moore's character being a washed up celebrity who's old age has taken away her sex factor in the eyes of the industry, that is until she starts taking a (are you ready for it?) SUBSTANCE, that turns her into a young, beautiful Margret Qualley, the procedure of taking the (oh i'm gonna do it again!!!) serum eventually having some unexpected, monkey-paw effects.
The film's dark satire is shown in the ridiculous way it goes about depicting the rich and powerful men of the industry, beggining the film by having these tight close-ups of the TV executive eating shrimp in a truly disgusting mannor, or using a urinal while making a truly inspiring face.
For my short I intend to have such similar chilidish yet dark humor that The Substance, and The Binding Of Isaac have.
Off the bat (like one out of hell (which is quite fitting for our subject matter)) we knew what the genre was gonna be, hell I knew what the genre was gonna be before I even got in a group, my favorite genre for anything, dark or black comedy. Dark comedies are great, they make you feel like the world around you has lost it's mind while still having room to take itself seriously.
While researching dark comedy I found this great article called What Is Dark Comedy And How To Master It, Now I have a few funny bones shaking around inside of me so I knew a lot about this, but it covers the main characteristics that make dark comedy comedic. The main thing to focus on is the social commentary aspect, something that we want to focus on heavily on our short.
To cut the short short, the plot will focus on a character who is power hungry giving up their humanity for control of the world through satanism, it's a pretty obvious metaphor, Otto, the main charcter, uses the power of religion to fufill her own personal desires while being manipulated by someone who wants something out of her, it's a critique of religion and of the people who see it as a means to grow their status. We'll make jokes throughout the whole thing that play into how ridiculous the situation that Otto - someone dissatisfied with her lack of power through christianity and turns to satan - is in. One joke I had in mind was having Otto putting up these ridiculous flyers with incredibly satanic imagery with text surrounding it talking about salvation of the soul and what-not.
Not too sure what image to attach to this so I'll just put a drawing of a pentagram I made, that seems quite fitting.
I've finally reached the final project in my media studies career and I know just what I want to do to finish it off. Since the start of the year I have been waiting for this moment patiently, I am going to make a short film package. My teammates this go around will be people who I've never worked with before, but we're excited to see how our mind synergize together, my teammates Emi and Andrew are both equally excited to work in the same group as I am. We knew going in that we wanted to make this something weird with a dark comedic underline, I have similar inspirations for this project that I had for my portfolio project last year so I'll likely be looking back at my last blogs to see what approach and ideas I had when I was writing that project. We know this: it's gonna be funny, it's gonna be dark (both visually and figuratively), and it's gonna star Emi wearing a fez I found in a thrift store about a month ago, simply because we think it'd be intersting.
