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.
We do have a few ideas going around. The first idea I had for the story was about the devil hiring someone as a hitman and paying them in drugs that they would then take and use as a weapon, one idea I had would be Emi smoking something and the smoke that comes out of her mouth would become demons who would grab her target. The whole thing would have had an anti drug message as Emi's character Otto would slowly ruin her life the more she worked. Eventually I expanded this idea into a potential retelling of the Ivan the Terrible tragedy where he struck his son with a cane, blinded by his anger, and accidentally killed him, a recreation of that iconic painting of Ivan holding his son would likely have been this version of the short's ending. My plan was to have Otto have a girlfriend she loved and after doing a lot of drugs she is sent on her final mission by the devil to kill said girlfriend, to which she panics and tries to warn her, however the very high Otto isn't able to communicate what is happening in a way that makes sense and winds up scaring off her girlfriend. The short would end with Otto deciding to kill the devil and waiting as he knock on her door to which she shoots him through it, but as the door opens the corpse of her lover falls through and lands on her arms as she cries and holds her.
My team wasn't 100% on board with everything I had written about, saying it's too dark and needs to focus less on tragedy and more on comedy. I definetley understand their concerns but I have such high ambitions for this short that I know we will have to find a way to settle in the middle ground, which I already know will be hard.
