29. group dynamics oh, this is an interesting topic to write about.   Our group has been doing fine, thank god, so I don’t really have any complaints to levy. I will admit there have been some miscommunications here and there, and it seems like we’re discovered some parts of our personalities that clash with each other, though that’s not something that I’d consider a serious issue. As long as we’re having fun and the project s getting done, that’s all I can ask for.   I will say, I think this project has actually been bringing me closer to some of my groupmates. It’s been nice to share all of our creative ideas and find out that we actually share a lot of the same ideals and experiences. It can get a little hectic in the school environment, so sometimes knowing basic stuff about a friend an just fly over one’s head, but working together both in class and outside of it has made us slow down and get to know each other a lot more. We connect over ideas, and it often surpr...

  28. gigi's closet this is gonna be a silly little fun blog today. i wanted to take a moment and do something that is both enjoyable for me and also informational for you, the readers! and so, because of that, i decided to give you a little tour around gigi's closet. not literally, obviously, but i hope this can give you a little more insight on what her costuming for the rest of the movie could've looked like! now, if i actually decided to put like a million pictures on here, the blog might never load. so, instead, i'm just gonna be sharing my pinterest board for her! it's nice and organized, so you don't need to worry about getting lost, lol. without further ado, here it is!

  27. lighting I’d say that lighting was one of our main concerns throughout the project. Right away, we were well aware that we’d have to be careful with when we chose to shoot. Since our setting had a window, it wasn’t like we could just shoot at any time of the day and pretend it was actually night, because the view outside would give us away. But we also had to choose a time that had relatively consistent lighting. As pretty as it would’ve been, there was no way we would’ve been able to shoot at, say, golden hour. The lighting changes immensely over just 5 minutes during that time, and that could affect the shooting if we needed to redo scenes, as well as the consistency of the shots.   Our use of natural lighting wasn’t exactly out of will, but more so out of need. Much like sound, we didn’t have the equipment necessary to do what we wanted to do, so we had to make do. Just four girls, a couple pennies, and a phone with a tripod mount. I won’t lie and say that it was ...

  26. editing I’m sure most of you were probably expecting this blog to be shorter than it’s actually gonna be, lol. If you really want to know the little details, you should check out thu’s blog! She’s bee the one mostly in charge of this area.   But i’ll do my best to give you the rundown, and I might even tell you of my own little pieces of work for it.   First thing I wanna get out of the way is what type of video software we were using. And I say were because of a… slightly inconvenient but also funny little hiccup in our process.   As I’m sure everybody knows, TikTok got banned recently for like.. 12 hours? Barely a day. But, the important part here is that a handful of apps also got banned alongside it. One of those being, yes, CapCut. Now, CapCut and I have a looooooong history, way back when I was a 10 year old girl on the BTS Amino app making very bad edits of colorful k-pop boys. It’s a relatively easy software to use, everything is labeled and the...

25. title sequence Title sequencing might have been the hardest to decide on, aside from maybe the shots. We had lots of ideas, though I wont bore you much with them. I’ll try to make it quick.   Originally, we had planned to do the title sequence in the form of the main character, Gigi, flipping through a digital camera’s photo gallery. Since we wanted to have a nostalgic feel, it felt right. We could also get creative with it that way, since the titles could appear in interesting places on the photos. However, we also quickly realized that it wouldn’t be possible to do that. Our film was growing to be too long with all the ideas we were having, which I’m aware is a common thing for people like us who have a little too much dreaming on our minds. Aside from that, it also occurred to us that… none of us had a digital camera to do this with. And where would we even get the photos? would we have to pay some middle aged woman to pretend to be a mother?   Luckily, we were ...

24. sound we chose to go for diegetic sound for our project. honestly, it would have felt wrong to go for any other choice. like i’ve been yelling in your ear for about twenty years now, the movie itself is something that i think needs to be really personal. it’s a piece of gigi’s sentiments and journey, and i wanted to bring in that sense of intimacy and realness in every way we could. so, diegetic sound felt like the perfect choice, because it grounds the listener into the setting of the movie. you’re kind of limited to what the character can hear, it feels less of being a spectator and instead a friend who is genuinely there in the moment with her.   as we were filming, we did run into a couple of issues. we didn’t have the equipment necessary to isolate the sound during filming, which is something I would’ve liked to do. for the most part, we managed. until an unexpected sound leaked into the recording for the last half of it. we’d thought the house would’ve been quiet enou...

23. day one of shooting you know what, i kinda feel like i'm clickbaiting if i dot clarify this right away so... we actually only had one film day, which is what i'm gonna talk about now. our film opening is rather simple, so not a lot of moving around was required, thankfully. we'd planned to begin filming somewhere around 12, but we actually ended up beginning around 12:30. luckily, it didn't really affect our timeline, so the mission had officially begun once we were all in gia's house. we stumbled across a couple of issues, like how the space turned out a little different than we expected it to be so we had to improvise and rework some of the original shots that we had planned. i actually found that i liked the newer ones better than the original, though that may just be because it was easier to see the new ones in motion, compared to the ones we had simply imagined in our brains. one of the first things we encountered was video. we had to decide which phone had...

  22. why the mom? but we have reached a checkpoint! it's been a little bit since we've had a more relaxed post, so here we are.   so, i wanted to take this blog post to answer something im sure some of you are wondering: why the mom? the dad could've been the one to pass away, but why did you pick the mom to be the absent parent in gigi's life? well, the short answer is because it connected to our target audience better, as well as to ourselves. the long answer is... i wanted to talk about how complicated of a topic to represent girlhood is. not because people are unwilling, but because its such a varied experience. sure, there are some common threads that link them all to each other, but every single woman in the world goes through a different journey. media often portrays female teenagers as irritable, rebellious, mean. its a trope that almost everyone knows of! you're either the popular mean girl, the "not-like-other-girls" girl, a nerd, or you're ...

21. supporting characters so, there's not actually any physical appearance of any supporting characters in the film opening, but their presence is still felt! for example, her father is included in the form of a voicemail and a text message. aside from the obvious purpose of  furthering the story along, his presence in the film opening and in the movie as a whole is to emphasize the effect that gigi's mother's passing has had in her life. he is used to emphasize her loneliness and struggles and how, despite the fact that her father is still very much alive, he is unable to provide her with any sense of comfort or closure. the mother, of course, isn't in the picture anymore. it's not explicitly stated why, and i honestly think its better that way because it lets the audience fill in the blanks for themselves. it kind of allows for a deeper connection, since the audience can decide for themselves how it happened. but back on topic, i think her mother is the one charac...

20. color in the project you know, i used to wonder why, in every single cartoon i watched, the main girl and boy were always blue and pink while the supporting characters ended up with colors like green, purple, orange. characters tend to get associated with a certain color, one that can often reflect their inner thoughts or feelings without exactly telling you. you know, the rule of showing and not telling. a great example of this is barbie. the icon herself is pink, ken is blue, skipper is purple, stacie is teal. pink, specifically, is prevalent in our project. gigi, our main character, wears pink in the film opening. her sash is pink, her room has hints of it in there. its a color that represents a kind of femininity, which is important to our main character and is prevalent throughout the film in many ways. she's doing her makeup, which is something commonly seen as feminine and often bonded over by women. femininity also relates to the things currently going on in her life. i...

19. main character analysis so, our main character’s name is gigi. let’s get the stuff you already know out of the way! gigi’s turning 18, and she just recently lost her mother, so it’s her first birthday without her around. as a result, gigi’s kind of in a fragile emotional state. she’s just trying to have a win after a long while of lows, you know? in the movie, she’s getting ready for her birthday when her dad breaks the news that he’s not gonna be home in time to celebrate her birthday with her. so, obviously, she’s feeling lonely and abandoned. and i’m sure you know that she’s blonde, blue eyed, and fair skinned because you have most definitely read gia’s blogs and her introduction post…. right? :) in terms of personality, i would say she’s like a typical teenager girl. she’s quite feminine, as you can see through her attire and how her room is set up. posters, light colors, pretty furniture. you could also say she's strong and resilient, considering her current situation and ...

18. costuming 'ello, 'ello! welcome back one  and all to my blog, today's blog post will probably be a little shorter than usual. we're gonna be discussing costuming in our  group film today! now, usually when you think of costumes you think of very unique, remarkable pieces that instantly distinguish the world or character it belongs to. dorothy from the wizard of oz and her red heels and blue gingham dress, the bright orange camp half-blood shirts and greek armor plates from the percy jackson series, barbie and her iconic pink... everything. but, in our approach to costuming, we decided to take things a little more casual. the movie is supposed to feel personal and realistic, it deals with a heavy topic so it wouldn't feel right to put gigi in a clown outfit or something. but it also didnt feel right to put her in mourning attire. she's meant to be just a teenage girl, doing her best. so, we chose to go for some cute pieces. some jeans, a tank top, and a jacke...

17. preparing to film i'm in my director era, i say to my delusions. nah, just kidding. we're not at that point yet. but we ARE at the point in which we're about to film, so let me update you guys on how we're preparing and what we've got right now. i'm gonna split this up into a couple of categories, but lets start with the stars of the show, the actors! (or... actresses, since we're girl bosses) 1. actors the lovely gyongy is gonna be our main character, gigi, and i'm gonna voice the dad (i wanna thank the academy, my parents, my hair rollers...) 2. costumes the setting for the movie needed to feel very personal and casual for the main character, so we let gia have control over the outfit she would wear in the film. however, we did try to have a light shade of pink for storytelling purposes that i'll tell you all about in a later blog post. 3. props our props were arguably one of if not the most important part of this. they are what we tell the sto...

  16. storyboarding the project storyboarding was, honestly, the longest part of the process. throughout the entire thing, from when we were first coming up with the idea to now, it has been difficult to really explain and put into words what i see in my head. so, storyboarding was both hard and helpful. hard, because i wasn't the one doing the drawing most of the time. not the good drawings, at least. i've got a couple pages in my notebook that just have some really unfortunate looking scribbles that somehow turned into the artistic renditions that you are about to see. they're mostly as ugly as they are because i was very enthusiastically trying to explain the vision to my groupmates. it was also a little hard because there was a bit of a language barrier, for lack of a better word. not only were we all interpreting the scenes in different ways, but since we were from different countries we often struggled with knowing what to call certain things, or we misunderstood each...