Week Four - Group Meeting 1

At first I was nervous to do group meetings; I was hesitant to share my idea because my outline for this project was vague in my mind, or even felt like it wasn't enough. The meeting not only helped me figure out new ideas about what I want to do, but gave me insight on what my classmates were doing; seeing their blogs and each of their creative processes made me feel inspired. Each project was different and original in ways that I did not expect. It told me a lot about each classmate, what's important to them and their goals for the end result, but it also showed me that everyone's in about the same spot- still trying to figure out what they want to do, what's practical and it calmed me down a little bit.

After presenting my idea to my group, I found that it resonated with them, which caught me off guard. They were able to give me ideas and input that really helped me form the plot of my movie, but more specifically my film opening. I hadn't thought past what I wanted the film opening to be like, but I needed to consider each of the characters, their relations to each other- for example, why would the couple want to harm this target in the first place? I had no clue, and although I'd thought to myself that I needed to figure this out, nothing stood out to me. My group helped me consider my options, for example maybe the target had dated and cheated on both of them. 

I hadn't looked into font types, and then it occurred to me that I hadn't come up with any titles either. When I mentioned all of this to them, one of my classmates suggested "A Crime of Passion." I'd mentioned that in my mise en scene and prop and costume design that I wanted to incorporate flowers, so we began looking up flower types. We stumbled across "Gardenia" specifically because it sounds interesting, but then one of them suggested looking into poisonous flower types, which I was very interested in. 

While we were brainstorming poisonous flower types such as "Aconitum, Amaryllis, Lily of The Valley" etc, my teacher walked by, overheard and suggested "Hemlock."

Hemlocks fit the dainty, vintage-aesthetic idea that I had in mind when I was first planning out this project, and they're white, which coincidentally is the color that I wanted to incorporate heavily into my video through the couple's outfits. Hemlock is poisonous when ingested, and can give some people a severe rash when they come into contact with it. After ingesting any part of the plant, it causes muscle paralysis that can lead to paralysis of the respiratory muscles until dying of oxygen deprivation. Death can be avoided via artificial ventilation for 48-72 hours, when the effects wear off. Ingesting more than 0.1 grams of the plant, about 6-8 fresh leaves, or a smaller dose of the seeds or roots, can be fatal in adults. 

Not only does the name "Hemlock" spark something in me as it's simple and catchy, but after researching the flower itself I settled on this as the title of my film opening. It also gave me the idea to use this flower as a prop for my film opening, using it as the method that the couple wants to use to kill their target. I'm deciding between how they're going to have this target ingest this flower, however. I thought they could do this through tea or a drink, but I want to get across their idea in few words, as my film opening won't have much dialogue over the music I want to incorporate in it. Their plans for killing this target will be shown through props and their materials: notebooks with notes and writings, various pictures of the target etc. 

Overall this group meeting really helped me form a better idea about what I want to convey in my film opening, but I still have a lot of work to do finding props, costumes and actors.

For this flower in particular, because I can't use an actual Hemlock flower, I'm going to search on Amazon for fake Hemlock flowers, or any flowers that look like they could be Hemlocks.