Dementia Research: Speaking to Real Patients

 Tomorrow afternoon, my friend and I are going to learn more about the disease and visit a retirement home to speak to those elderly patients who have it in person. We hope this will help us understand the psyche of those with dementia and help us to portray it properly in our film opening project. In addition, him and I are doing extensive research on the disease and watching various videos about the subject such as those provided by the Alzheimer's Research Center. To get ideas, I have also been watching a variety of short films about the disease on YouTube.

Next week we will start planning and brainstorming the project. Tomorrow when we go to visit the patients, we will simply be having conversations with them to understand their mannerisms, being as respectful as possible and not be too calculated about the subject.

Film About Dementia: Update

I'm not sure how I feel using my grandmother as a subject for my film opening about such a sensitive topic like dementia, so I will have to find another way to portray this in my film opening without using an elderly character. 

On another note, I am planning on working on this project with various friends who are not in my class, many of which are familiar with the album which is the inspiration for this idea. One of these friends, Nicolas Rivera, also really likes film and has wanted to work with me on a film project for a long time, so I see this as a great opportunity to do so. 

In terms of research and planning, everyday I'm diving deeper into the music hoping to get a greater understanding of the psyche of someone with this disease, as well as researching videos about dementia and resources describing it. I hope to represent this subject in the most appropriate and accurate manner possible, and if it turns out I can't use this as the subject of my film opening anymore, I suppose I will have to go with my Plan B which is some sort of psychological/cosmic horror film surrounding the "Backrooms." If Plan B is a no-go, I will most likely go with my Plan C and make a film opening for a coming-of-age film.

Film About Dementia

 While pondering in class today, I had the idea to not just make some abstract psychological horror film opening, but to do Everywhere At The End of Time justice and use it as a soundtrack in a film depicting dementia. I would film my grandmother and I would use her as a medium to represent dementia in parallel with the developing score of the movie. Although we're just supposed to make a film opening, if this were a full-fledged movie or short film, the film would surround the story of both the dementia patient and their caretaker. Although this may sound boring at first, the purpose of the film will be to depict the horror of this awful disease and therefore I would employ experimental filming techniques to retain audience attention and represent the disease through the visual medium. In addition to being a film about a meaningful and important subject, it would also be extremely easy to film as the filming locations would be mostly in my house or neighborhood as well as the fact that my grandmother lives with me. 

New Idea for Film Opening

The other day me and some of my friends faced a genuine scare, which I would not like to discuss in detail, but in short it gave me an idea for my film opening.

Recently, I have been listening to this album called Everywhere at the End of  Time by The Caretaker. In layman's terms, its a six-hour long album which simulates the development of dementia, probably one of the only pieces of work in the horror genre which genuinely chills me to the bone. Strangely enough, I almost find this album beautiful in a way. It's not much in terms of musicality, it mostly consists of slow ballroom music and contains no lyrics, but as you continue listening (about a couple hours in) the music starts becoming much more menacing in a subtle way. It starts slowing down even more, and some of the instruments start to stutter and go off-key. Later into the album, it slowly becomes more and more distorted until it's just static.

Some album cover art from the various "Stages"

Truly horrifying. The psychological horror of this album is truly admirable, and I would even say this album is somewhat cathartic, in the sense that its almost like a projection of your inner subconscious. I digress however, point being is that I would like to create a film opening which uses the introduction of the album as the background score; the opening to a piece of psychological horror. Shots would be empty and unmoving, with very little elements and subjects to contrast. The tone of the piece would be desolate, leaving the viewer with a feeling of loneliness, almost as trapped in a fever dream or alternate reality. 

I was thinking something similar in tone to these pictures:

Planning the Cambridge Portfolio Project

 Now that we have finished our music marketing projects, it is time to finally work on our big Cambridge assessment: the portfolio project. We're supposed to be making an opening for a fiction film, maximum of three minutes. I'm almost certain I want to make an opening for a coming of age film, I love that genre so much. I don't have a clear idea of what I want though, but I have been taking inspiration from a variety of indie films as I really like the aesthetic they have and their production. For example, I love the use of color in The Florida Project to reflect childhood innocence and coming of age,  while I like the stylistic choices of the movie Antrum (which is actually a horror film) which rely on visual language to communicate the story, such as the use of color, symbols, lighting, etc. I feel like I want to have some sort of flower field or corn field in my movie opening, as these are usually symbols for simple living which are the biggest themes in most coming of age films, in my opinion at least. I want my film opening to feel cathartic, almost.

Music Marketing Project Follow-Up

We may not have been the most creative individuals on the planet, but we sure did try to at least show off in front of our classmates. 

Our project started with the main goal of being original (quirky and different, if I may), using unconventional filming techniques and post-production editing to make our music video stand out. However, we realized that by following this dogma we would be faced with unnecessary stress, so we tried to keep things simple in regards to filming and composition and focused on our experimental storytelling. In the end, we decided to veil our lazy camera work through this storytelling and well-done special effects by, yours truly, Luis Rodriguez. I filmed the project within one day with the help of a friend outside of our group, allowing us to focus on our presentation and editing rather than crunching everything last second which we almost ended up doing.

Much of the ideas which influenced our music video came from our case studies and personal preferences. Our song started with these weird, glitchy vocals which we thought reminded us of the "techy," synthwave sound of the song Blinding Lights by the Weeknd (even though they sound nothing alike).  Falling into the R&B genre, we incorporated it into our case studies along with Khalid's Free Spirit, which sounds more similar to our song C'mon Talk by Bernhoft, and through this we were able to gather enough knowledge on the genre to plan our project. Focusing on the "techy" aspect to our song, we created a character/brand surrounding this experimentalist style of music called Neue, who would act as a personification of this R&B. We also made sure to not get carried away by this theme of tech and experimentalism, so in our presentation and music video we tried to constantly reference back to fundamental genre of the song by emulating and mentioning genre characteristics.

Examples of effects we used to match the experimental "vibes" of our music video were pixel sorting and data-moshing. Pixel sorting is an effect which essentially sorts pixels in a certain proximity in order of their color value such as hue, saturation, or brightness. It ends up creating an effect that looks glitchy and artistic. Data-moshing, as discussed in my previous post, is an effect which causes portions of a video to not change how they are supposed to, causing compression and superimposition of motion and video between different clips. This also ends up creating a cool looking glitch effect, which in combination with pixel sorting allowed us to tell our story with greater engagement and therefore reducing the labor of the project upon ourselves by using unconventional but easy film/editing techniques.

After all was said and done, we then worked on our presentation during the course of a 3-4 hour Discord call with my teammates, and to be honest, I was very surprised with how well we all worked together and did our part for the project/presentation. Everyone gave it their all in making our presentation as attractive and engaging as possible, and I believe we succeeded in that. We wrote a 4-page script before our big day to make sure we would not stutter and mess up the presentation (although that didn't work completely as planned), and we revised the aesthetic of our presentation multiple times to match the theme of our virtual band. It was probably one of the few times where a group project seemed to work cohesively and efficiently.

Overall, we were all very satisfied with the quality of our work when we finished, and I hope future media projects will be as cohesive as this one. Although in the beginning I was very stressed out since we had a week left to do our project, we eventually came up with an effective plan to tackle the project, allowing everything come together nicely. We believe our project goes to show that through cohesive teamwork and creative storytelling, you can make a simple concept engaging and original which will garner the attention it deserves.

Music Marketing Project Development

Recently, we were assigned a genre of music to do a music video on for Media Studies, our's being R&B (rhythm and blues). Of the three songs we had to choose from, my group agreed upon a peculiar sample: C'mon Talk by Bernhoft. We had to act as if this was our brand—our character— and market this music video as if it were our first song. Amongst the current circumstances and limitations we faced, we had to get real strange with our ideas: we decided to brand our musician as an omniscient being who is simulating the music video through artificial intelligence.

The first time we heard the song we thought the file was corrupted, to be honest. The song begins with very harsh auto-tune, becoming more and more glitchy as if it were a  broken record until it leads into the main hook. From there on, the song seems to be be relatively normal, however getting pretty repetitive after a while. This gave us the idea that the music video could be a simulation, with the artist attempting to create the perfect music video through artificial intelligence. 

Small details throughout the music video would start to suggest that there is something wrong with what is being shown, eventually stacking up to be incredibly noticeable until the simulation collapses on itself and the music video simulation has to be rebooted after the artist inside the video becomes conscious that he is inside a simulation music video (trippy, I know). We would introduce the idea that he is in a simulation with effects such as data-moshing—a technique of damaging video clips to create a glitch effect wherein frames that should change don't. The level of glitchiness would be in relation to how aware the character inside the video is becoming, eventually becoming engulfed by darkness as the environment disappears. Overall, we want to fill our music video with lots of abstraction and experimental effects like these mentioned to create a surreal experience for the audience which will attract them to our artist's brand.

Examples of data-moshing

As complex and difficult it may seem to accomplish these technical and cinematic feats, our project is actually simple film-making techniques (for the most part) under an artistic disguise. One of our biggest limitations being we can't meet in person, we took it upon ourselves to make our music video both interesting and easy upon ourselves to produce. We would employ standard music video tropes such as singing to the lyrics, filming in different locations and cutting between them, etc. but we would use the power of context and storytelling (alongside actually good cinematography and VFX) to make these scenes more engaging and interactive, ultimately attracting the audience through the story while making it simple upon ourselves to film.

Our mission making this music video is to ultimately show that simple film-making techniques paired with creative storytelling (and some technical feats) can differentiate between a shitty video and a really cool one.