IMPORTANT UPDATE

 We got together today to film most of the scenes for our project (Maddie arriving home, the diary scene, her mom coming to get her) and we also re-shot the scenes from last time (Maddie in the car getting dropped off) since we thought they could be improved. 

We had everything planned out and we were going to follow our storyboard (which is one of my past blog posts) including more scenes other than the ones in Maddie’s room. Before we started filming, we had to switch to filming on our phones since Fatima couldn’t find the charger for her camera, and we had to hurry before the sun went down. After we finished filming, we decided to create a quick draft on Capcut, putting all our clips together to have some sort of idea of how the opening was going. 

When we finished putting all the clips together, we noticed various problems. First of all, our opening was extremely long (passing the 2-minute requirement) and the whole story felt rushed and too resolved. We started with Maddie leaving school, going home, being downstairs alone, going to her room and writing in her diary, and then her mom coming to get her and suggesting going out. All this was too ambitious and didn’t help us achieve the somber and slow tone we wanted to create with this drama film, especially since it deals with the topic of depression. Our second problem was the fact that it was way too long, and we needed to cut scenes. 

So, that same day, Fatima, Satina, and I sat down and created a whole new story board focusing only on Maddie going on social media after school during the first day of summer, writing in her diary, and her mom making her go out. This way we focused more on the fact that she is depressed and not so much on the background context that made up more than half of the opening. To show various mise-en-scene elements that established context, now that we didn’t include the first part, we included them at the start along with the opening credits. We added shots of her picture board, a calendar showing it’s the last day of school, her nightstand along with a framed picture of her and her best friend that moved away, and a picture of her and her dad.  

Here is this storyboard we quickly came up with:

We will get together again on Thursday to film. Santina suggested using her mom’s camera to film and we all agreed on taking a slower approach to this piece to capture the drama.