Project Components

After nine long weeks of Circus Monkey taking over my life, I'm beyond relieved to announce that all components of the project are finally complete!

VIDEO COMPONENT

She's finally ready for everyone to see!!! Click here to watch.

SOCIAL MEDIA COMPONENT

Click here for the link to the Circus Monkey Instagram!

PRINT COMPONENT

The print component is attached below, but can also be found in this link (click here).

Critical Reflection

The student-made short film, Circus Monkey, is an introspective character-led story that depicts the dangers of seeking validation from social media in the worst of media subcultures.  The film, which can be described as a dark drama, illustrates one man's descent into madness as he desperately corrupts himself in an attempt to provoke shock value.  

One of our major inspirations when drafting the character of Diego was David Fincher's The Social Network (2010).  This major feature film follows the story of a young Mark Zuckerberg, and one of the most intriguing aspects of the film is how Fincher doesn't shy away from depicting Zuckerberg as a nerdy, self-righteous asshole.  This characterization was a great influence, especially when writing the dialogue for Diego and Ericka's final conversation towards the end.  

Another major inspiration for Circus Monkey was Eugene Kotlyarenko's Spree (2020), which revolves around an attention-hungry Uber driver who embarks on a killing spree that he live streams in a desperate attempt to gain an internet following.  This film serves as an inspiration for the character of Diego, and the depravity that is often illustrated (albeit, to a lesser extent than in Kotlyarenko's movie) by those who discard their morals for popularity.

However, our biggest inspiration when drafting the character of Diego was the research that we conducted on incels and the enormity of their internet subculture.  We researched several incels who have been made famous by the internet, most notably the story of Chris Chan.  Chan began posting on YouTube in the late 90s, and his obsession with his fans and fame completely took over his life.  He began to make more and more concerning content as his popularity grew, ultimately resulting in the rape and murder of his own mother.  We also looked into the case of Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old gunman who murdered 6 university students as an act of "revenge" for his inability to lose his virginity.  Rodger rose to fame for his infamous video manifesto, which we used as inspiration in our film.

Elliot Rodger

Diego, our protagonist

Our film appeals to the target audience of 15 to 25-year-olds, as this age group tends to have a deeper understanding of social media culture and the incel mentality.  Circus Monkey could be consumed by both men and women, as there are elements in the production that appeal to both.  On one hand, the harsh criticism of this overtly male-dominated sphere paired with the feminist ideology portrayed by the character of Ericka help to market the film to a female-oriented audience.  On the other hand, the film is heavily led by male characters whose interpersonal relationships aid in building a male audience, considering that they know first-hand about both the incel mentality and the video game banter.

It is very evident that Circus Monkey offers a negative representation of self-titled "involuntarily celibate" (or, incel) men.  As I've explained previously, incels are men who are incapable of getting a girlfriend, and blame that fact on women as a whole rather than taking the time to reflect on themselves.  Our film depicts these men in an undeniably unfavorable fashion, and I believe that we were accomplished in our portrayal of this subset of people as disgusting, misogynistic, and deeply insecure.  This is demonstrated mainly through Diego's last conversation with Ericka, but also in the way that he is so reliant on the validation of others.

The target audience is constantly being engaged throughout the production, whether it be with the mention of multi-player video games like Fortnite, social media apps like TikTok and Twitter, or just generally being aware of how a need for social media fame and attention drives one to extremes.

One could argue that Circus Monkey serves as a sort of "warning sign" for oversharing online, but in reality, the branding created for this film is more representative of the dangers of the incel mentality and the dark truth about the many men like Diego.  When advertising our film, we stuck with a constant gray, black, and dark blue palette; representing both the tone of the film and the loneliness and isolation expressed by our main character.  This color scheme can be seen in all the components of the project - from the social media, to the postcard, to the film itself.  We maintained continuity in all three components by incorporating the monkey illustration in both the Instagram account (as the profile picture), and also in the back side of the postcard, as well as using dust textures for both.  Additionally, we used a screengrab from the film itself as inspiration for our key art, and maintained continuity with the font choice.

The film includes a montage of Diego's deranged TikToks, which are symbolic not only of his growing fame, but also of his loss of sanity.  As the film progresses, his self-exploitation incites him to transform into the titular circus monkey, performing exponentially more outrageous acts in an attempt to grow his social media following.  The importance of TikTok as a platform is highlighted in our Instagram account, where we use one of these videos as a marketing tool.  Finally, there is a very obvious monkey motif that is followed meticulously in all elements of the project.  The monkey is unmistakably a significant element of the film, as it is this dreaded animal that inspires sexual thoughts in our protagonist, initiating his entire spiral.  The monkey can be seen in Diego's calendar in the film, as well as in the reflection of his glasses on the postcard, and as the profile picture on the social media.

After a stressful nine weeks spent thinking solely about monkeys and incels, I'm happy to say that we've finally crossed the finish line.  Working on this project has provided me with so much stability and motivation, and I am so grateful to have been able to do it with two of the most talented people I know.  Although we suffered several time constraints and filming issues (and we could've afforded a couple of extra weeks to edit), I am beyond proud of Virginia, Clara, and I to be able to say that we made this incredible short film from scratch, and I'm so excited to share Circus Monkey with the world.

Postcard

The postcard, an essential section of the project components, is a tool used for advertising and marketing.  Similar to posters for movies with a theatrical release, postcards are used as an easy way for short films to make their presence known at festivals.  Those who have worked on the project tend to pass these out, which builds intrigue and curiosity in the audience, leading them to be present in the viewing.  Therefore, we had to meticulously choose what to include in our postcard; for much of our audience, this is the only chance we have to impress them and sway them to come to see our production.

When my group and I divided the project components equally amongst ourselves, we decided that we would all play to our strengths.  For these reasons, I (as the resident art kid) took on the task of creating the postcard.  Using the knowledge I acquired through my previous research, I knew that we had to include the title, key art, major names, dates/times of the viewings, and the film festival we are showing our production at.

To create a visually interesting composition, I choose to manually illustrate our character.  This ended up being incredibly time-consuming and a little bit of a naive choice, but the payoff was ultimately worth it.  Once we had the illustrated base for our character, I was able to add in the most important (and yet, very tastefully subtle) detail: the monkey being reflected in his glasses.

Afterward, it was time to upload everything into Photoshop and pull it all together.  After playing with the text composition for a while, we chose to have the title of the film as a sort of masthead above everything, and the important names next to the character.  We then added a gradient overlay filter to the illustration and some dust texture to the background for depth.

As for the back, we knew we had to include the dates and important info, and Clara and Virginia had the genius idea to have it emulate a calendar as a sort of reference to the film.  So, we opened Illustrator and made a mock calendar that included the dates and times of the showings.  After, we added our social media handle, the logo of the film festival we are "showing" our film at (manifestation is real), and a goofy doodle of a monkey that we've been using for branding on the social media page.  And finally, we used the same textured background for continuity.  

In the end, I'm happy to say that we're all incredibly proud of how the postcard came out.  I love how it's sleek and professional, and the viewer's eyes are perfectly drawn to all the key elements.  I think that the postcard is a good representation of our film, and I'm excited to see what everyone thinks!

Editing

Thank god for Clara DeLuca.

On Saturday, she spent the entire day looking through footage, uploading it all to Premiere Pro, and creating an entire line edit for (almost) the entire film, and it looks incredible.

Today, Virginia and I met up with her to look over the entire edit, and to assert our own opinions as to how the final draft should look.  We filled in some of the gaps that were missing from the edit, but we spent most of the day searching for music.  After quite a few hours, we found something that fits the vision we all had for the sequence, which was quite an accomplishment for us.  It's the perfect mix of funky jazz and drums, and it creates the perfect ambiance of curiosity and excitement.  I've attached the song below - listen from the starting point of 1:26.

For now, I think we're at a pretty good place with editing, but it's obvious that we need to grind and get shit done quickly.  Tomorrow in class, we're planning on spending time finishing the monkey/Ericka sequence, and working on final and title credits.  While Virginia and Clara dedicate 100% of their time to this, I've been working on an illustration for the postcard.  We took a screengrab from one of our shots, and I used this as inspiration to create a drawing of Diego that showcases him at his computer, and will include a monkey Easter egg in the reflection of his glasses.  It's still a work in progress for now, but I'll be done soon. 

And that’s a wrap!

Aaaaand we're done filming! Finally! It's been a long, tedious process, but I'm glad that it's finally over.  We decided to dedicate Thursday and today to filming, and we (unsurprisingly but thankfully) finished it all!

On Thursday, we met up after school at around 6 PM at my house and knocked out all the scenes we needed of Diego in his room.  We had Ren there to help with cinematography, and we were able to film everything that we needed in the span of around 4 hours.  This schedule wasn't too long, but it was a pretty draining day for all of us.  We messed with lighting a lot, giving some scenes a darker indigo feel to represent loneliness and to give it a heavier tone, and we used a lighter blue/lilac tone for the lighter, more social scenes.

On Friday, we met up around noon outside of Publix to get the scenes of Diego and Ericka's conversation.  This was probably one of the most exhausting days for all of us.  It required long hours out in the scorching Florida sun, and a lot of re-doing the same scenes over and over again.  As a token of gratitude, I stopped by McDonalds to get a burger and coke for Jack for his help and dedication.  After this, we quickly stopped by Virginia's house to get a few scenes of the outside of Diego's room, and we finished the day back at my house filming some final TikToks.  And just like that, we're done!

For now, we're taking the rest of the day slow and using it to rest and recover from the last two days of intense filming.  Afterwards, we'll be meeting up tomorrow and Sunday to edit, and we'll use the rest of the week to finalize everything.

Day 2 of filming

A lot of filming needs to still be done.  Due to the time constraints, we're absolutely resolute to finish filming this week.  We made a schedule that consists of filming all day Thursday and Friday, and spend the weekend editing.

In order to get ahead, Clara, Vir, and I allocated time in class to record audio - specifically, we recorded Diego's two friends' banter over the computer.  The role of the two goons was played by Manny and Jack L, who are both in our media class.  We thought that their voices fit the part pretty well, and we knew that both of them had prior experience with acting and film.  So, we got our little squad together, borrowed a mic from the TV equipment closet, and set up shop in the studio (which provided the perfect isolation from outside sound).

We were able to get a lot of good clips, which we're gonna put over footage of Diego on his PC.  At first, we were a little apprehensive of recording the audio separately, as we feared it would be complicated to edit into a cohesive conversation.  Regardless, our actions stemmed mainly from necessity, and I believe that the sentences are short and snippy enough to work in the context of the overall piece.

            

After school, Clara and Virginia came over to film many of the scenes were were missing that didn't include Jack.  These consisted of the close-ups to the monkey calendar juxtaposed to close-ups of Virginia's character Ericka, which when edited together will create a montage sequence linking Diego's perception of the monkey with sex. 

             

After this, we started editing together the footage that we have already recorded.  This only makes up about half of Act 1 and about a third of Act 2, but it's good progress nonetheless.  For now, we're gonna focus on the print component and the social media page until we can film again.

Day 1 of filming!

WE FINALLY STARTED FILMING LETS GOOOO!!!!  We're finally somewhat on track!! Making progress!!!!  Although our filming schedule has changed since the last time I discussed it on the blog, we still put time aside on Saturday to film as much of Acts 1 and 2 as we could.

On Thursday after school, we had gone to Becon to rent filming equipment from Jim, and we now had all we need to set up shop.  So, Virginia, Jack, and I met up at my house where we transformed my brother's room into Diego's incel dwelling.  Filming was somewhat complicated, considering that I have very limited experience, and Virginia prides herself mainly on screenwriting and acting more than actual cinematography.  This definitely threw a wrench in our plans, and we spent way longer than we should have setting up each shot, orchestrating both lighting and composition.

In the end, I think that we got something that we can very much work with, but it didn't really hit it out of the ballpark for me.  This is a little worrying, but I just hope that we can work with Clara and possibly Ren to produce a more advanced shot composition for the later scenes.

Regardless, we made a lot of progress.  We managed to film most of Act 1 (except for a few scenes that require Diego to be talking to some friends online), and we got a lot of the TikToks for the Act 2 montage done as well.  These were quite fun to film, lol.  We were all cracking up as Jack yelled into my phone about his superiority complex.  Anyways, good progress has been made.  I'm pumped!

Having to work twice as hard

Hello all.  Today in class, we put time aside to divide ourselves into small groups and discuss our projects.  In doing so, there was a lot I learned about what direction to take.

First of all, I really enjoyed the opportunity to be table to converse with my peers about the ideas we have coming into the project, and listening to their feedback.  When discussing Circus Monkey, they all seemed really excited about the film, and they all had good things to say.

However, I've gotten to a point where I'm quite nervous about the fate of this project.  When discussing how far along everyone is with my group, I realized that most people were wrapping up filming, and had already created the print component.  This subconsciously told me that I need to hurry my shit up!

I realized that our group has developed a sense of notoriety, and that only makes me want to push harder to be able to realize out vision.  Regardless, I'm worried that we won't be able to execute it.  These thoughts of failure have been plaguing my brain for the last week-or-so, and I'm excited to finally start filming and get ourselves back on track.

We'll start filming this weekend, so expect a blog to come then!

Finally filming!

Finally, after so much time lost to conflicting schedules, we have created a cohesive filming timeline that works for all of us!  Today in class, Clara, Virginia, and I sat down to orchestrate the preferred schedule.  Despite settling on filming over the weekend, there are still certain conflicts that will make things a little difficult for us.  Mainly, Clara had to go on a last-minute trip to Boston, and won't be back until Sunday.  I'll also be occupied part of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and Ren (who was going to help us with cinematography) is also booked on Sunday.

Regardless, we persevere!

Virginia and I have decided that we'll be filming with Jack on Friday and Saturday, and Clara and Virginia will film some scenes on Sunday.  I believe that this timeline will work for all of us, and we'll be able to get a lot of filming out of the way.

Additionally, we've put aside time next Monday, Tuesday, and Friday to film as well.

Filming Issues Pt.2

Things have definitely gotten to the point where I am starting to panic a little, I will not lie.

We are now nearing the end of Week 7 out of 10, and we have yet to even make a filming schedule.  Originally, we were planning on filming all of Week 8, but unsurprisingly, even more scheduling conflicts have arisen.  After talking to Jack, he confirmed that the only days that he's free to film are Monday, Friday, and the weekend.  This is a big problem.

We definitely can't film on Monday (ie. literally tomorrow), as we don't have the equipment, Jack hasn't even read the script, and we haven't come to a definite conclusion on wardrobing.  Friday could potentially be doable, but I have an important event I need to go to at night, and Clara just received news that she needs to fly to Boston at the end of this week.  We could attempt to film on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday without Clara, but we also want her to be included in the production.

This left us thinking about perhaps getting a different actor.  Although that would be a heartbreaking last-minute decision to make (as I really do think that Jack is the perfect choice for this role), it is one that we have to consider.

Clara, Vir, and I have decided that we will meet up after school tomorrow and decide where we want to continue with things.  I will update y'all once we come to a definite conclusion.

Acquiring our most important prop

The year is 2056.  I sit in a dark room, plopped uncomfortably in a rickety wooden chair whose origins are unknown to me.  The darkness of the room surrounds me, suffocating me even, and I feel frightened and hopeless.  I have no idea how big this room truly is.  I have no idea how long I have been in here for.  All I do is sit and wait in this godless abyss, hoping that one day the reason for my suffering is revealed to me in a biblical fashion.  Suddenly, I hear a loud screech; it's a noise that I can sense everywhere, but the location of its origin is lost to me.  Then, I finally understand: it's an intercom system.  The voice on the other side pipes up, sounding monotonous but proud.  It speaks to me, saying over and over again "Monkey f***er.  Monkey f***er.  Monkey f***er."

I understand now.  The room is my own subconscious, and the voice on the intercom is my own cognition.  For days, this project has plagued my nights and my days.  I worry that we won't be able to pull off such a massive task with the little time we have left.  Yet, we must prevail.

Hopefully this analogy wasn't too stupid.

What I meant to say was, we've been making progress.  Slowly, sure, but progress nonetheless.  Today, we were able to get one of our most important props printed and ready to go!  As I'm sure you're all aware by now, the reason for Diego's spiral into online fame is due to his absurd claims of wishing to have sexual intercourse with a monkey.  Since this is so important to the plot, we needed to conceive of a potential reasonable scenario where Diego could make the association between sex and apes.  In the end, we decided that he would attempt to look at PornHub, ultimately fail to find anything of interest, slowly become focused on a monkey calendar that is nearby his desk, and then events ensue...

Clara, who is phenomenal at graphic design, created a calendar for us to use with a picture of an attractive female monkey on it (I mean, as attractive as female monkeys can be...?).  We then got it printed at CVS, took it home with us, and added little doodles and notes to make it seem less like a prop and more like something that has been used frequently.  Now, we're ready to set this up in my brother's room and make it look real.  I'm really contemplating putting this up in front of his desk without warning him beforehand.  I think that could be quite funny in fact.

Jesse we need to GRIND !!!

Today was a very eventful day.  Clara, Virginia, and I were all finally able to meet up and discuss our creative vision in detail.  We met up at Virginia's house early in the afternoon, made some mate and brought out some snacks, and got to work.  We all divided the script into scenes and shots, and then Virginia and Clara (who both have a lot more expertise than I do in actual media production) took on the role of creating a shot list.  While they planned the composition and lighting of every shot, I took on the role of illustrating their vision in a storyboard. 

Although we rarely prepare for a film this much, it felt adequate to do here.  The three of us have extremely high hopes for this production, and we want to be as prepared as possible for when the filming days are finally among us.

ft. Joaco drawing

Although we were able to organize the entire script into shots, we only storyboarded the first act.  The second act, which will be made up mostly of montage sequences, will be much harder to conceptualize without first having all the footage that we want to include.  This is because the montage will include both Diego's own deranged TikToks, but also videos made by the "general public" reacting to his claims.  This is something that we plan to film ourselves, and possibly include cameos from other people in our class.  Additionally, we will be relying on the help of Andrew Dunham, a close friend of ours who is also a very skilled visual effects animator.  He will be helping us bring to life the social media sphere in the form of cool graphic sequences and animations.  Because we're still undecided on how we want this to look, we decided to set it aside for later.

We also decided that we want to use a lot of cool-toned lighting.  We want to give the impression that his PC is the only source of light in his dim room, and we'll be using blue, purple, and green RGB lights to emulate that.  Since we're filming soon, we might need to pay a visit to BECON and rent filming equipment.

The Script is Done !!!!!!

Hello all.  By this point in the project, we have fallen majorly behind schedule.  Due to so many scheduling conflicts, we haven't been able to fully sit down and work on this together, and we have all been extremely busy in our personal lives as well.  Regardless, we're not the type of people to give up that easily.  Instead, the issues have only led us to be more passionate and determined to make this work.

Here she is, so nice and pretty

Thus, I am very very excited to announce that Circus Monkey has been officially written!  This is a major step for us, both in the project and in our own work ethics.  Virginia, who is our resident screenwriter, feels extremely accomplished in having written this script.  This is one of the longest works she's ever written, and we all agree that it's also one of the best.

I'll save you all from reading it in its entirety, but I'll provide a basic summary.  The film will be divided into three acts; the first one will focus on developing the character and building up to the major point of conflict, which is, of course, the monkey-f***ing TikTok.  The second act will begin just as the video begins to gain traction, and it will follow Diego's descent into semi-madness as he becomes obsessed with this online persona and the attention he's been receiving (no matter if it's good or bad).  Finally, the third act will display how he is no longer getting the same attention, and how he feels the need to lash out and do something even more severe to be in the spotlight again.  The confrontation between Diego and his ex-girlfriend (who we've named Ericka) will also occur in the third act.

A lot more work still needs to be done.  We plan on meeting up soon to work on a shot list and possible storyboard, and then we will create a filming schedule afterward.  Keep an eye out for more blogs to come!

Brainstorming postcards

Focusing heavily on pre-production elements, it's come time that we start planning our postcard.  We've thrown around a few ideas for what we want to include, but the most likely option will be a vertical 4x6-inch rectangle with text emulating an iMessage chat.

This is a clever way of getting all our information across, while also staying true to the subject matter of the film: social media.  In class, I quickly sketched an outline of our composition, with the film name at the top, social media and film festival info at the bottom, and important names and viewing dates somewhere in the middle.

However, I fear that this is too limited, and the simplicity of it all will make the postcard appear unfinished.  On the other hand, we're cramming a lot of information in the front, which could make it look too crowded.

We still need to finish working out the kinks, and split the information more evenly between the front and back.  We also had another idea of making an illustration of Diego with a monkey being reflected on his glasses, but we would need to wait until we began filming, as we would need to get a reference image from our footage.

Graphics

Our production is very social media heavy, and this is a fine line to work through.  On one hand, we need to explicitly show the TikToks that Diego posts and the comments that he's receiving, but on the other hand, we don't want this to be too cheesy and teen rom-com-esque.  To combat this, we had the idea to include graphic sequences showing the comments pour in, and that way we can demonstrate the mixed reactions while also maintaining a pretty put-together feel.

Now, creating the graphics is a completely different beast.  We all had different ideas about how we wanted it to be done, and the more well-executed ideas required a level of Adobe After Effects knowledge that none of us posses.  Thus, we decided to appoint the help of a close friend of ours named Andrew.  Andrew is, quite simply, amazing at creating special effects.  I've seen a lot of his work, and his dedication and talent when it comes to creating graphics is phenomenal.  We've talked to him about helping us in this production, and he's excitedly agreed.

Now, the only thing that was left was to create a list of TikTok comments that we wanted to include as a reaction to Diego's first controversial posting.  Clara and I both worked on this list, drawing inspiration from our own experiences of witnessing the creepy things that people say online.  A few days after, I coincidentally came across a short clip from a documentary on online pedophilia while scrolling through Twitter.  The clip originally caught my eye, and as I watched, I made note of a graphic they used and I really liked.  So, we sent both the list and the video to Andrew, and we now await his response.

Giving Diego "Depth"

Diego is a chronically online douchebag who wastes away his time on video games and social media.  In order to create this character, we needed to give him a Twitter account.  This account would serve as a vessel for him to spew out his bizarre opinions once he gains internet traction, and it could also serve the purpose of characterization.  Being the resident Twitter user in our group, I took it upon myself to create an account for our fictional protagonist.

I titled the account "@diegofuego451," creating a perfect mix of nonchalant-ness and cringe.  To me, the username shows a level of consideration, but not enough to the point that he cares about branding.

Afterward, it was time to polish up the account and give it the appearance of a real user.  We decided to take some time today in class to do a mini "photoshoot" with Jack, and we used these pictures for both the Twitter profile picture and a promotional post on Instagram that will advertise the actors.  I wanted the profile picture to be a selfie where he's donning a goofy smile, similar to other pictures of nerdy boys I've seen around the internet.  We also had him mess up his hair a little, as the gelled-up look was too preppy for the character we envisioned.

After the profile pic was decided upon, we had to move onto the header.  This was where I hit a roadblock, as headers on Twitter tend to be either promotional, representative of a brand, or pretty much random.  I considered making the header a promotional advertisement of our film, but ultimately decided to simply make the account look as "realistic" as possible.  Since Diego is an avid video game player, I decided to build off of that angle to complete the page.  I looked up screengrabs of Call of Duty gameplay, and instead used that as the header.  This is still a very early version of the Twitter (and it will most likely be subject to change), but I'm happy with what we have thus far.

Here are some other photos that we took (including one of Virginia, as she will be playing Diego's ex-girlfriend), for your viewing pleasure!

Weekend Update

Hello again, my loyal readers.  This weekend, we took some time to catch up on small things that needed to be done.  After having divided the work, we realized that Virginia would write the script, Clara would post to the social media page, and I would create the postcard advertisement.

We are proud to announce that we now have an Instagram that you can all follow!  The account is named after the film, and we're gonna start posting over this next week.  For our first postings, we've decided to dedicate a post to our two major actors: Jack and Virginia.  However, this will need to be done next week as we need to take headshots of them during class.

For now, enjoy our early postings to the Instagram!

As for everything else, we are almost done with the script, and early versions of the postcard are being drafted.

Postcard Research Pt.2

Hello again.  Apart from already having conducted my own research on short film postcards, we also went over some more conventions last class.  I learned that the cards are size 4 x 6 in., double sided, and can be either horizontal or vertical.  They also include the title, key art, director's name, social media information, film festival/awards, and the the date, time, and location of streaming.

When looking for more examples, which there are very few of, I found several that include these key elements.  I realized that most examples feature a fully-colored character contrasting a dark background, which is something that we were planning for our postcard as well.

We had originally planned to illustrate a postcard featuring Diego's face in the dark, lit up by his computer screen, with his glasses reflecting the image of a monkey.  We thought that this would be funny, while also creating intrigue about the plot.  Yet, we fear that this focuses too much on the monkey aspect, and doesn't provide an accurate representation of the plot.  We also drafted an idea for a vertical postcard that imitates a phone, and we could use this to further present the social media aspect.  Updates to come soon.

And it’s name will be…

Hello all.  Since we won’t be able to film until Spring Break (or possibly until the week after), it’s really imperative that we get as much work done in these weeks as possible.  This includes posting to the social media, working on the postcard, and finalizing costuming and location.  But, in order to progress, we need one of the most essential aspects of the short film: a title.

The title went through a lot of changes from the start of the project to now.  At first, we were pretty determined on naming it “Liberal Dogma,” both because we thought that it would represent the incel mentality of wanting to commit bestiality, and also because it’s pretty funny. However, the title changed as our storyline evolved.  Virginia wanted the name to be associated to boyhood, and for the title to be something along the lines of “Boyish.”  However, Clara and I both agreed that the title should deal more with the social media attention-seeking aspect, since that’s really what the bulk of the story is about.  I drafted the name “Traction,” but we ultimately threw it out for being too vague.

Finally, we came up with the perfect name: Circus Monkey.  This title perfectly encapsulates the social media aspect, the need for attention and providing entertainment, and is also a cheeky little reference to the monkey.

After looking at some fonts to incorporate for marketing and key art, we decided that the Plastic Beach font was perfect.  The wonky letters show the distortion in the character's mentality, and also add an air of whimsicality, which is a nice touch.  Overall, I like that this font doesn't take itself too seriously, but still generates intrigue.

Filming Issues

Just like the monkey, we're f***ed.

Today, our group met up with Stoklosa again to discuss the film outline we created.  Surprisingly, she really liked the ending.  However, she had some critiques over other elements.  Namely, we had originally included a funny sequence where Diego opens PornHub, gets distracted looking at a picture of a monkey, and then first makes the connection between the mammal and sex.  We thought that this would create a cohesive connection between the two, but would also be comical and fairly light-hearted.  Stoklosa criticized this, claiming that the scene implies that Diego really does want to have sex with the monkey, and it discredits the idea that he's only stating this for attention online.

We argued against her claim, explaining that the tweet stemmed from a real thought, and that that then inadvertently sets off a chain of social media attention that he wasn't expecting.  We still want to keep the scene, but we might need to go back to the drawing board and make some changes.

However, the biggest issue that we realized is that we have hella scheduling conflicts.  Like, a lot of them.  Trust me.  There’s a lot.

First of all, Jack, our protagonist, will be starring in our school's production of Legally Blonde, which premieres this week.  This means that he won't be available on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.  Saturday is unavailable for us, and so is next Monday.  Additionally, Clara and Virginia will be leaving to California for TV next Wednesday, and they'll be gone until the following Monday.  By this point, it'll be Spring Break.  These conflicts really worry me.  The only days we would have available are Sunday (the 12th) and Tuesday (the 14th), which are also problematic.  There's a chance we won't be able to film on Tuesday since Clara and Vir need to catch a red-eye early next morning.  This leaves only Sunday.

However, I'm worried about filming part of our scenes on Sunday, and the filming the rest two weeks later, as there are several things that could change between then.  For example, Jack could get a haircut, the room could have things moved around, etc.

Therefore, I think that we're gonna prioritize filming over Spring Break and week after that.  This worries me, but I hope that we can use those weeks to make progress in other aspects of the project.