Week 3.1

To be real with you readers out there, I have been having a hard time keeping up with these blog posts. Mrs. Stoklosa has created a really good outline set up for our class already but I think it would be best for me if I put myself on a more strict schedule. Or rather, more specific schedule that will keep me more updated on these blogs posts as I recognize that they are an important part of this process. So, with this in mind, I want to uphold myself to turning in my blogs on Mondays; to write about the goals for the upcoming week, Wednesdays; to give an update on our progress of these goals, and Sunday; to recap on the past week and whats ahead.

Alright, now to continue with this goal (even though I am starting a day behind but, better late than never) I would like to talk about what my group and I have been focusing on this week. During our last meet up, we were able to get a clearer idea on our movie and plot, as well as our ideas for our film opening. One obstacle we were noticing is we do not really know much about how to pull of poker schemes and what some strategies are. So, we decided that we need to research some more on those.

My first thoughts were to look up ways to cheat at poker. What I found was that the most common types of cheating are switching, or hiding, cards and working with friends. Conveniently, for our film opening we have three main characters which are working together. I also like the idea of hiding or switching cards like in the movie Solo.

While reading further into how to cheat on poker with partners the main component to successfully pull of this technique is to have good signals. The signs need to be subtle, yet repeatable as a way to be less suspicious and undetected by the other opponents. Some suggestions were to make signs like: where the chips are placed, taping on the table, blinking, coughing, or touching your eyes, ears, nose, neck, ect.

There is also the switching cards approach that I think we could incorporate into our film opening as well. My thoughts on this strategy is that our main character only uses this when it is his last option to win the game. He should always have an ace up his sleeve. (note pun)

Week 2.2

My group and I met up today to get a clearer idea of our film opening idea and our plot outline. At first we struggled trying to see eye to eye, or rather, being able to understand the direction one person wanted to take it in comparison to the other person. For instance, I had more of the idea of the backstory of our main character.

I was thinking of a young male who had a quick wit and sarcastic, but a smart, quick thinker. Who also came from old money but no longer had that privileged lifestyle anymore due to his father and shady business deals which landed him in prison and now runs a poker scam with his two buddies to make more money.
Today, we later further developed this into his father being found guilty of tangling with the mafia and committing tax fraud. So now, Nathan Hill (the main character) and his two companions have been running an underground poker scam as a way to try to gain information on his father and what his part was with the mafia.


My group and I have also started thinking about setting and where we can acquire the props we will need for our film opening. Going off the inspiration of  the movie Rounders, we want to have the setting look more run down and use yellow hues to further emphasize that.

We also want to pull from the movie from the Star Wars franchise, Solo(2018), in the last scene, Han Solo plays their universes version of what seems to be poker, against Lando Calrissian, in an effort to gamble for the Millenium Falcon. Lando attempts to cheat by hiding a secret card in his sleeve which Han had already removed before their bets were made.

With these in mind we started looking online for poker tables we could buy: which we found out is actually very expensive, so we also started looking at possible ways to make a table ourselves. We also needed to think of different locations to film as well. My first thoughts was my garage, because there is a lot of stuff in there, which makes it look rundown, like the setting in rounders, and there is enough space to fit a SUV which gives us enough space to work with the set more and add our props as well. However, when we went into my garage we noticed that with the door closed, while the lighting was yellow like we wanted it was also really dark, which would mean that we would have to get brighter lights to light up our subjects rather than darkening the shot on the camera while in production. So, our plan is to meet up sometime this week with lighting equipment and cameras to test out everything at my place and we also want to check out deans garage and see if his will have more sufficient lighting to work with as well.

We also decided on the name of our film, which is Bad Beat. This is a poker term which means: a player who appears to have strong cards nevertheless loses. Which we thought represented the plot of our movie very well as part of what Nathan and our other swindlers are doing is playing their opponents at their own game. They make it seem as though they have no good cards, making their opponents feel more confident to gamble more money, only to be surprised by what cards they have been holding.

Week 2.1

For my group, the most important part in this planning process is to have a solid film idea to pursue. In class we have focused our time trying to brainstorm different film opening ideas as well as  research more into different ideas we were interested in taking on.

One of my group members had researched the genres Si-Fi, Adventure and Thrillers so he was all steams ahead for a film under these umbrellas. So we got to brainstorming. However, throughout the process we realized that much of these action movies required more resources than we could acquire.

The reasons for this is just lack of time due to conflicting schedules. I work everyday after school until 6pm, this takes away any production time during the day for us but, I am available anytime after that which still leaves us some time if we plan to meet on a weekday. One of my other group members is also going to be on a trip for an entire week which will really make our production process tight. In class we made sure to work on a rough outline of a schedule.

By the end of our brainstorming process we had decided on the idea of a poker movie film opening: The main character, Nathan Hill, and his two partners, Rebecca Martin and Chester Hill, run an underground poker scam in order to pay off his father debts- who is in prison for tax fraud due to some bad deals with the mafia- and find out the truth about his dads history.

So, our first steps were to research different poker films and famous poker scenes. I decided to focus mainly on poker movies whose plot most closely fit the idea we had. The most popular one I had found, which had also fit our story line the closest as well was the film Rounders (1998): A young, reformed gambler must return to playing big stakes poker to help a friend pay off loan sharks, while balancing his relationship with his girlfriend and his commitments to law school. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128442/) Directed by John Dahl.

When I watched the final poker scene of this movie I wanted to make sure to pay attention to shot, composition, and lighting techniques the director used. What I noticed was the use of a lot of close up and extreme close up shots of the characters faces,
mainly focusing around the eyes,



and close ups of the props on the poker table like the cards and poker chips. Dahl also used dark, yellow, lighting hues which gives the setting a dull, dirty feel with the pairing of the worn down walls around the two main characters being focused on.

Music Marketing Project

POP Genre

The pop genres typical target audience is teenagers and young adults ranging from the ages 15-24 years old. Artists like Billie Eilish use colors to brand themselves. For example, Billie has branded herself with the colors green and black and uses this color scheme heavily on her website and social media accounts. Pop artist also heavily rely on social media and collaborations with other artists as a way to further market their brand. 

Jay Moon

With this in mind, my group decided to utilize color branding and decided to band our new artist, Jay Moon, with the colors purple, red, and blue. We used this color scheme throughout all of our marketing techniques and heavily amplified it in our music video as well. 

While coming up with marketing techniques we found that about 72% of instagram users are from the ages 13-17, which made instagram an great platform for us to promote our new artist and expose him to his target audience. Other social media apps like Snapchat and TikTok were also important platforms for us to take advantage of and help further promote our brand. Through Snapchat and Instagram your able to make promotional filters for people to use and help market our brand. We also wanted to utilize the new trend which lots of artists like Ariana Grande have started by making social media teasers which can be posted to promote his new music video.
For our music video it was important to us to really amplify our color scheme. However, finding the best way to do this was not an easy task. We originally wanted to use liquid paint and fill balloons with these colors. Our plan was to take these balloons and use them as an aesthetic throughout our music video. But, after a long night of testing with the balloons we found that this may not be the best route to go for our idea. From there, we had to start from scratch again, only knowing that our color scheme was very important to our brand. We eventually found a suitable solution that still gave the effect we were looking for.