Twilight Zone Chase Scene Lesson 1

Monday, March 16, 2009

Although I was slightly disappointed to learn that we will not be able to work with my old group, at the same time I was also quite excited as it is a new chance to work and collaborate with other students. Different combinations of people often produce very interesting results, so I will be anticipating what will happen with our final product.

Our roles were chosen today:
1. Catherine Dennig - Director / script writer
2. XiangYi Cheow - Editor
3. Christorpher Checketts - Sound Editor
4. Me (Camille Yung) - Camera Person

Catherine wanted the film to be very original, one of a kind, and suddenly, I came up with this weird bizarre idea of an invisible chaser, POV for the audience (which could be a creature, spectre, thing, the victim's conscience etc) chasing a victim. Throughout the film, you don't know who you are and why you're chasing the victim, but you are. Because we all have seen last term's screening, we concluded that we did not want a cliche typical boy chase girl movie.

We consulted with Ms Wong about the feasibility of the invisible chaser idea, but she said that it would be extremely hard to convey this to the audience, so we decided that the idea void, although I still really liked it.

Catherine told XiangYi and I to come up with ideas so that she could write the script, which I thought was quite confusing because the whole group should be coming up with ideas, not just XiangYi and I, but since she was the director, we listened to her anyway.

We came up first with a list:
Door - lamppost - from a rubbish bin - jump up ledge - appear behind a sofa of a chinese family, (they can yell, 做meh呀！搞meh鬼！出去!) jumps behind wall - up up from a bush - crawl under table - fall out from a tree - run into a football goalie - fall into sea

But Catherine didn't like it because she said that there were some really typical portals like a door, and crawling under a table, so she said that we had to come up with a different one. XiangYi and I picked our brains but no more new ideas, so we went onto YouTube. From one clip, we saw a rewind of a person jumping back to the camera off a really tall pile of boxes, and we have decided that we will use this technique when trying to jump onto high places.

Unfortunately, the lesson's time is up, so we just handed our list of ideas to Catherine, but she was unhappy with it, and she said that we would change it. I would be anticipating what ideas that she can come from

Problems/ Diffuculties
Communication - Catherine was quite obvious (in my opinion) that we did not want to think of anything, and just leaving XiangYi and I to do the thinking. We did not communicate well with her, and I think that next time, we should talk to her more frequently and asking her for ideas as well instead of just us doing everything.

IB Learner Profile:
Thinkers - I thought that we have put alot of thought into our portal line, though Catherine didn't like it very much