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.