Group Meeting #1 Reflection

Hello blog!

Today in class I had a group meeting with members of other groups. We brainstormed about each other's film ideas and blogs.

Here were my full group meeting notes:

For Julia’s blog: 

• When mentioning a movie, add a link to the film’s IMDB or Wikipedia

• Add screenshots from the credit sequences you’re researching, a screenshot of the “delicate, elegant typography” of Black Swan, or “scratchy, handwritten-style font”. Although there are screenshots of the movie poster, they don’t add to the blog besides making it look nicer.

• You do good analysis and discussion of credit/opening sequences, but you’re missing reflection/takeaways in some.

• The formatting and how you include multimedia is good and make the blogs very smooth to read.

• Overall, I think you should just make sure to stay consistent, keeping relevant screenshots and links throughout your blog posts and making sure to describe, analyse, and reflect in each one of them.

For other group members:

• Zombie story, helped with credit sequence (flickers between “real” and “zombie” word) 

• Last day of school girl is depressed and doesn’t care about summer

• Beach party, “friends” abandon girls who blacks out on the beach, and then when she wakes up a figure in the distance comes towards her, helped with the “ending” of the opening, adapted an amber alert / missing poster at the end

• Psychological drama about toxic couple, guy is alcoholic, flashbacks to guy abusing her, adapted 

Notes from group:

Pivot from thriller, a lot of students are doing it and it’s difficult to do well.

From Julia about my blog:

The Thriller Film Openings post provides amazing stills of the opening for the three movies discussed with their respective Wikipedia pages. Even though the overall post is good, I would have liked to see a little bit more analysis for the techniques used and maybe a video of each opening also linked. I really enjoyed the research blog post on how thriller openings create suspense, the different approaches are accompanied by great examples that include links and pictures with a concise analysis of the decisions made.

Reflection

Overall, I think this group activity was helpful for all of us. We helped each other develop our ideas more fully for our films - for me, I realized with a little guidance from my teacher that perhaps thriller isn't the best genre to do because of how often it's done this year and how difficult it is, which doesn't necessarily discredit a lot of the research I've done, as I've still learned a lot about openings and their universal approaches. 

I also worked with one person from my group, Julia, trading ideas for how to improve our blogs and what to keep up. I thought her blog was very well formatted and developed for the most part but just needed more consistent reflection and relevant multimedia. 

Her comments for me were helpful too: keep it up but include a bit more analysis and embed the YouTube videos for the openings themselves.

I'll discuss the idea pivot with my actual group for the film opening and report back soon.

Stay tuned