The Elevator, Signs, The Black Hole critiques

We watched 3 short films in our Digital Video Production class.

The Elevator is a pretty funny story about this guy's awkward elevator ride, although I think the music in the video is too ordinary and simple and does not make the video emotional, music is quite important in a movie to add more atmosphere to the story line changing, The elevator has got only 1 track in the whole movie, does not assign the main character's emotion during the elevator ride, could have used different track of music to help with the guy's feelings in the elevator.

SIGNS, this short film is a great video! I like the angles of the camera, and the way they film it, background music changing is just in the atmosphere, and also a great happy ending love story, creative story and concepts on the story line, it has got climax in the story line to make the audience interested in finishing watching the film.

The Black Hole, the concept of this movie is about the reality of our society, and dirty human thoughts with a great imagination and humorous ending to be ironic to the moral issues of our real world and the reality.

Storytelling, Jessica and Emily's Crazy Journey

This task is very interesting, we get to ask different people for some first random words to college 100 words, and we write down these 100 random words in small pieces of papers, then everyone in class get to choose 20 words randomly from the small pieces, then make up a story within these 20 words that we have.

And the 100 words I collected from people are: earth, smoke, pink, water, moment, cloth, sun, sports, draw, slow, wait, sleep, tomorrow, empty, home, sex, eat, shit, more, eighteen, speak, music, skin, peace, die (25 words from Egor)
football, balls, jersey, coach, goal keeper, winner, victory, champions, water, vodka, bear, elephants, cheeta, parents, love, miss, food, sweet, cakes, tea, coffee, sushi, respect, hospital, doctor, tooth, kill, fantasy, weird, high, drunk, funny, hangover, movie, scary, monsters, dark side, cookies, milk, rabbit, sex, hamster, kids, grandma, teacher, party, brother, stupid, annoying, honey (50 words from Masha)
pencil, travel, friends, gun, ice, beer, family, sketchbook, sister, motorbike, photographs, dance, music, china, India, girl, teacher, bag, brush (20 words from Shyam)
Roof, shoe, smell, pain, crap (5 words from Amir)

So I got some interesting words today, 20 of them and they are: class, happy, family, jump, future, paper, sister, belong, love, designer, kiss, bike, kfc, sweet, go, life, door, smell, box, piss.

Jessica and Emily’s Crazy Journey

A new family just moved in town, both parents are young and still working hard at the beginning, so they chose to send their daughters Jessica and Emily to a boarding school.

Today is the first day at their new school, they decided to find some food on campus to fill their starving stomach, surprisingly there’s a KFC on campus, both sisters headed over to class after breakfast in KFC, the first class went well.

During the break, Emily found Jessica and asked her to walk with her around school to get to know their new school , Emily had to take a piss while they were passing through a very smelly bathroom, Jessica started adding some red lipstick on her lips in front of the mirror while waiting for Emily.

“ Weird, there’s a golden door in the corner.” Emily mumbled, as she came out of the toilet.

“No one has ever opened that door before” a stranger responded, after a noisy toilet flush sound, she came out of the toilet, walked to Jessica and Emily, said hi, and told them her name is Jess. “Hi, I’m Emily, this is my sister Jessica, but I like to call her Jess just like your name” Emily introduced and continued tracking questions about this golden door “hm, new Jess, nice to meet you, you must be a teacher here, so what do you know about the door?”

“This door used to belong to a crazy witch, she died somehow and haunted the room inside, and I think the witch’s body is still in there, explains why our bathroom smells like shit all the time, and I suggest you guys to stay away from that door and this bathroom, you guys shouldn’t be here” the teacher explained with warning.

“Why are you using this bathroom then? Hmmm teachers are definitely treated differently here ” Emily mumble while the teacher walked to Jessica and told her to take her little sister away from here now, then she turned to the mirror, “shit I almost forgot!” she yelled then kicked the door and ran out of the bathroom.

Emily didn’t care what a teacher had just told them, she opened the golden door easily and whispered to her sister “hey, Jess, look this door is open.

“Are you nuts?! Emily, that teacher had just told us to stay away from there, let’s go back to class!” Jessica yelled at her little sister full of fear in her.

Emily didn’t care what Jessica said either, jumped into the darkness behind the door, Jessica couldn’t just leave her alone here, so with the most unwilling spirit, she followed in.

“Emily, Emily, where are you?” Jessica whispered and tried to find her little sister in the dark; BoomB! The sound of the golden door shut down behind her, then the light gradually coming out of the darkness.

“Relax, Jess, you will help me save Emily’s life” A man’s voice trying to calm Jessica down and  standing next to a giant machine with a big black hole on it.

“Who are you? Where’s my sister? Where am I? And what is that?” Jessica panicked.

“People call me Designer, and my name is Designer, I’m a scientist, they call me Designer because I design lots of amazing and unbelievable equipment, I also install them as well.” He smiled with a wink and continued “So you are in one my of my brilliant designs right now, this entire room is a time machine, there is no time here, but outside this room; this machine is also my lab, home, and transportation for me to travel the world in different times, see right now we stopped in year 2112 September, I haven’t decided where and when to for the next station, brilliant home! Isn’t it? Takes me to anywhere and anytime, although I can’t leave this machine in my entire life, once I leave the machine or to where I’m originally from, my time in here will be gone even faster and I will become old or dead.” He sighed with sadness on his face, “but I really love this place, after this great time project, I started focusing on the space project, ah! Spaces! I really love the space, different experiences.” Designer said proudly then told Jessica to come over to the machine where he stands next to, “this is a 5 dimension machine, it’s like a rocket in your world, takes you to that space through this black hole, people outside this world are into the universal space and galaxy, but I prefer tiny space; but unfortunately, your sister Emily got trapped in there when I was experimenting with the equipment, now you have to give me your lip texture to save your sister, the tiny details of your lips will help us find Emily in there and lead her the way out of 5 dimension world.” Designer answered Jessica’s panicked questions perfectly;

Jessica found her lipstick in her hand bag and put it on then grabbed a piece of white paper and left her lip texture on the paper, Designer took the paper very carefully and threw it to the black hole.

“Jess, it’s time for you to go back to your world, you can’t stay here too long, your time will be gone, here is the only way out” Designer hurried and took her to another giant white machine which looks like a giant toilet “Emily will be waiting for you with a bike on the soccer field, go and find her when you are back, and tell her to take care of that bike, it is mine” Jessica jumped into the machine and thanked this weird scientist for saving her and her sister’s life, “bye” she said with desire, Designer suddenly realized something when he was about to flush her back, “Jess, What happened just now will happen again, you need to stop this routine when you are back, try please.” Designer flushed the machine.

Just by 1 second, Jess came out of a normal size toilet and heard a little girl mumbling about a golden door, she went out of the toilet “Hey, you guys better stay away from there, you, Emily DO NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!” she screamed at the 2 girls who were about to open the golden door, then she turned to the mirror and saw an old grown up Jessica in the mirror and ran out to the soccer field “and my name is Jessica not Jess!” she warned before she left the bathroom.

On the soccer field, there’s Emily standing next to a weird looking bike, she seems all grown up just like her sister Jessica; tears dropped out of the sisters eyes, but those tears are the happy tears.

PROCESS

These images are the development of this entire story, there's my draft of some paragraphs and content, and some mind maps to connect the 20 word together. I wrote my thoughts and sentenced to describe the story on the draft book, then in the end, manually corrected words, gramma and phrases.

Story Telling Understanding

What is story telling?
Story telling is the conveying of events in words, images, and sounds, often by improvisation or embellishment.
Today we had a known some basics of Story Telling in our Writing for Designers class; we talked about pace writing, pace writing has a construction that is intro content climax and outro:
1, intro as introduction, to start a story to narrate the place, time and characters.
2, content as what's happening in the story, to narrate the situation of the story to give the whole story a base to begin with the story.
3, climax as the top of the story line, to keep the story to the top, there's a turning point before the climax.
4, outro as the end of the story to finish the whole story.
The order of these four paces can be changed, we can start a story with climax or the other 3 paces.

We also talked about the first person, the second person and the third person in story telling:
1, the first person as "I" "we", a story can be told on the first person's behalf, as the experiences that happened around me, or us.
2, the second person as "you", the second person can not be telling a story, but in a story, the second person appears to be in a conversation or commands.
3, the third person as "he" "she" "it" "they", the third person can also be telling the story, and a story that has been told on the third person's behalf makes the story more mysterious.

Story telling is a very interesting topic, stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation, and to instill moral values, crucial elements of stories and story telling include plot, characters and narrative point of view. Well, storytelling is the matters of culture, education and cultural preservation, it makes people obtain lots of knowledge through the stories, the better story, the more memorable, impressed and inspired, a better way of storytelling could make the whole story wonderful and also memorable.