Simple and Happy!

Hello again! Here I am back to the brainstorming process. I have yet to think of anything that I would willingly want to make into a short film, but we still have a little bit of time so there is hope. Also, my partner has the flu and has been unable to come to school this entire week which is very unfortunate as I have been unable to discuss the story of our short film with her. Nonetheless, the show must go on so I shall continue to research! Today I am going to be looking into "feel good" film productions. Just last class my teacher was recommending the television show "Modern Love". My teacher explained that the reason why she enjoyed the show was that it was happy and simple and not a lot of film productions nowadays are able to achieve this purpose.

When your doorman is your main man

So I went home and I watched "Modern Love". "Modern Love" is a series of short episodes that retell real-life stories that were once documented on a column in The New York Times newspaper. After watching the first episode I decided that I totally agreed with my teacher. The world needs more of these heartwarming stories. Sometimes I feel like I am suffocating in the tragedies of the world as I see film production after film production tell me how terrible our world really is. Not to say that it is not important to take a step back and reflect on the mistakes of humanity but sometimes I think it's important to recognize the beauty of the world.

So then I decided to research more productions that gave me that "feel good" vibe. In my quest to find the characteristics of such films I stumbled upon an article by the name of "7 Heartwarming Animated Short Films For A Relaxing Evening". After reading the article and checking out a couple of the productions I learned quite a few things about these types of films. Number one is that they all have happy endings, obviously, not every story has a happy ending, but that is the job of these films to present the audience with a story that does. Also as seen from the title, all of these short films are animated which is not a skill that I have, but I was able to take a lot of other characteristics into account after watching them. I realized that many of them had very limited dialogue as they focused on portraying the story over telling the story. I also realized that these productions placed a heavy focus on music since the dialogue was not a predominant feature. Often times the music would help develop the story and the tone of the production. All of the films also tended to have very few characters. I think this focus on one character instead of multiple allows these stories to be more meaningful as it allows the production to feel more personal and heartfelt. Lastly, these productions really demonstrated the idea of K.I.S.S that I had learned about earlier. Keep It Simple Stupid!

I learned that you don't need a complex story in order to develop an idea and that one does not need to overcomplicate shots or scenes in order to deliver a message. I find these types of films to be really intriguing and I would love to make my short film following the same basis of a simple yet heartfelt story.