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.