Facebook. Twitter. Formspring. Goodreads.
Photography. Journals. Work. Reviews & Coverage. Seedbook.
| Provided by website-hit-counters.com site. |
The entire Opening Sequence for “There’s a Teenager in the House” by Kerima Polotan was shot in such a way that would make the viewers feel as though they were on a journey with small hints that lead from childhood to adolescence.
The recurring themes are the house that remains the same from sunrise to sunset that interprets the cycle of growth in the house from beginning to end, from childhood to adolescence. The play on lights are meant to symbolize the innocence and loss of it through the abundance and lack of light. The merry go round was shot in an atmosphere that was bright and happy whilst the street lights were shot in darkness but the lights were somehow “outrageous” to behold, in order to symbolize the kind of enjoyment one would find as a child and the journey it would take to find it there.
The two hands (the child’s hands with the crayon and the teenager’s hand with the marker) is meant to tell the viewers that the narrative will be told in the point of view of the person “writing the story down on the paper”. The caged terrace is meant to embody the strictness within the household, which is evident throughout the entire story. The typeface was chosen in order to depict the innocence that remains within the story, despite it being a kind of “initiation” story. The two sets of books (the transition from children’s books to “Young Adult” books [Bolt to Lauren Oliver’s books] are meant show emphasize the growth of the child through interests]).
The main metaphor throughout the opening sequence is light, both natural and artificial, as it passes through and inside a household. Light, despite wherever it may go, remains bright so long as it stays as what it is - light. The story tells us that the child, though dwindling in dark areas, remains obedient in his character and therefore, remains as “light” even in the darkness.
The song “Sixteen going on Seventeen” from The Sound of Music (1965) is a literal accompaniment to the sequence. It provides a bright, happy atmosphere and at the same time, it carries the theme of “growing up” into adolescence and needing guidance from a superior.
Hybrid of 8.1 & 2.4
Type: Short Film.
Working Title: Safety First.
Thesis Statement: Carelessness can only lead to bad things.
Objective:
After viewing, the target audience should
- know the importance of having emergency numbers at all times.
- value security systems and locked doors.
Description: The story opens with a girl working until 6 in the morning for school things. She goes straight to bed and then it’s shown that she had not closed the back door properly. Then she goes to bed and is woken up by the dog’s barking and she becomes irritated immediately. She covers her head with her pillow, tries to put on headphones but nothing works. She rises from bed, groggy and annoyed, and then goes to the living room to find a large crocodile had gotten through the back door she had forgotten to close. The crocodile then tries to snap at the still barking dog and the girl is just shocked because there’s a bloody crocodile in her living room.
Hybrid of 5.1 & 4.5
Type: Short Film.
Working Title: Big Boys & Girls
Thesis Statement: The social interaction between boys and girls in an intimate setting at this day and age has changed rapidly in comparison to ages past.
Objective:
After viewing, the target audience should
- see the abrupt nature of modern “relationships”.
Description: The story would switch from the boy’s POV and the girl’s POV. The boy would just snap pictures of the girl while hiding in the trees or the bushes or classrooms or wherever and he would just take pictures of her. He would print these out and hang them on his wall or put them in his notebook, where she would never find it. The girl somehow notices this and thinks it rather odd but then finds it endearing. Sooner or later, he stops secretly taking pictures of her because that’s really creepy but he still takes pictures of her only he doesn’t hide it from her. She knows and that’s okay, I guess. One day, she just goes to run and hug him and then pulls out a photo of herself from inside his bag and shows it to the camera to show that she had known the entire time and then she winks.
Hybrid of 1.6 & 11.2
Type: Short Film.
Working Title: No Choice.
Thesis Statement: Lack of education is the cause of social disarray.
Objective:
After viewing, the target audience should
- appreciate the value of a proper education.
- understand the importance and need of a proper education for all people.
Description: The story would go along the lines of a girl who breezes through life as a well treated housekeeper. She has a room of her own, three square meals a day, decent bosses who treat her with respect, and the like. The bosses even take her to their trips wherever and would consent to take her abroad if it wasn’t for the fact that she didn’t have a “birth cerpriticate”. But then she gets knocked up by some guy and she says that she has to lie to her bosses because she has no choice about it and she has no idea what to do. She starts hiding the fact that she’s pregnant but then the bosses already know because it’s already showing and the she just pretends like it’s not there at all, like it doesn’t really exist.
Hybrid of 5.7, 2.2, 1.7
Type: Photo Essay Narrative-Exhibit
Working Title: Die Pretty.
Thesis Statement: People care more about what’s on the outside than what’s going on outside.
Objective:
After viewing, the target audience should
- become aware of the abrupt, unforgiving shortness of life.
Description: There is a girl inside a coffee shop who orders a cup of coffee and sits near the glass windows. Then there would photographs of her doing the things she does like scanning through beauty magazines, taking photographs of herself using a digital camera, trying to mimic the poses and facial expressions of the models in her magazines. All of a sudden the glass cracks as there is an oncoming attack of assassins that come in to the coffee shop and kill everyone. The last frame would the girl lying atop her beauty magazines, her blood spilled on the covers, her spilled coffee next to her, her eyes still wide open.
Hybrid of 3.5 & 7.7
Type: Short Film.
Working Title: Cheated.
Thesis Statement: Trust is a vital component in a relationship.
Objective:
After viewing, the target audience should
- learn the value of checking facts.
Description: POV mostly of the clingy girlfriend who works across a school. She sees the boy bringing the cousin to school and he even kisses her on the cheek. Show a montage of the girl calling all her friends and crying to them about how her boyfriend is cheating on her. The boy would then show up at her workplace and she would just start screaming at him about what she thought she saw and then he would tell her the actual truth, then the audience would get it from the POV of the guy in a dream sequence, and then the girl would be embarrassed and it would cut to her in remorse, trying to apologize to the boy for saying hurtful things about him to him and everyone else that she knew.
Hybrid of 5.2 & 6.4
Type: Short Film.
Working Title: The Lost Coin.
Thesis Statement: You only seek what is of value to you.
Objective:
After viewing, the target audience should
- become aware of what they consider valuable.
Description: Story of a beggar who asks for alms at abominable places. He looks around and around and finally, he comes up with PHP7. He goes to a mall to buy an ice cream cone but one of the coins rolls off and he has to scramble around the entire mall just to find that one coin. He goes through obstacles such as staring people, police guards who chase after him, naughty children who steal his coin before they drop it somewhere in the mall, et cetera. It would show all the lengths this man would go for just to get a single coin so he can get an ice cream cone.
Hybrid of 2.3 and 5.4.
Type: Short Film.
Working Title: Almost there but not really.
Thesis Statement: Sometimes, dreams don’t come true.
Objective:
After viewing, the target audience should
- know the fine line between dreams and reality.
- hope the best, expect the worst.
Description: Story of a girl who didn’t get in to the University of the Philippines. Girl who grew up in the slums and started reading books from the library, from friends who could afford it. All of her dreams would have been about getting into UP but then, she didn’t pass. Her life was spent building up to that one fantasy and then it came crashing down in a single rejection.
- Go to Greenbelt to meet Lauren Oliver. Meet awesome possum people while waiting for the thing to start getting a move on.
- Literally cry in the presence of a New York Bestselling Author who wrote a book you really like and she turns out to be this really lovely person.
- Go home.
- Write stuff.
- Take pictures of stuff.
Okay. So Lauren is living my dream. She studied in New York University and has a best selling book about love and has a fandom that writes fanfiction about her work. Yes, I do dream that someday - I’d write something heartbreaking and beautiful that people would fancast it and write fanfiction about it and I’d laugh because I would be in total control of that universe and all of them can weep about their OTPs but what I would say would be law.
One day, child. One day.
- Stayed at home the entire day and watched movies and worked.
- Could have gone to Church but I wasn’t feeling it.
- So I stayed at home and wrote and complained and watched things.
The choices you make define you. The choices you make when you’re loaded with so many things define your character. Here I am - bombarded with work and yet what do I do with my time? I watch unimportant things, like the same movies over and over again, until I’ve memorized the lines and delivery to a tee. But I know, at the very back of my head, there’s something else that I should be - need to be - doing instead.
I have anger issues. We’ve established that.
- Went to school to pick up some stuff.
- Went back home to write stuff.
- Texted angsty stuff to friends.
- Wrote more things.
- End of day.
For years, I had been making fun of my mother for that one journal entry she wrote. When I was a child, we’d have this thing of having private journals but mum reads then anyway because there was no sense of privacy back then. But my mother wrote down that she slept the entire day and I just remember that I used to give my mother so much crap about that. I realize that sometimes, you really can do nothing the entire day and feel horrible afterwards - like you’d done a hard day’s work of manual labour. It’s exhausting, doing nothing while doing something.
- Go to CONCEPT because my only other two classes were declared freecuts.
- Wait for Berna at Starbucks (and she took super long, mind you).
- Go to Glorietta to watch The Hunger Games.
- Bum a light from random strangers and then meet this poor, middle aged woman who just got dumped by her boyfriend and so she went to a mall which was far away from where she lived and bums two smokes from a random girl she doesn’t know and basically tells the two girls about her sad love life, where she lives, and even asks them if they have an extra ticket to the movie they’re going to watch. It was just the saddest thing ever.
- Watch The Hunger Games. “That is MAHOGANY!!!”
- Get lost in Glorietta while Jared Mario just acts really weird about stuff but doesn’t explain why so I just let him be so he can do this own thing or whatever.
- Home.
- Pass out from exhaustion because I had to get up three hours later.
That lady was just really sad. She lives sort of near where I live and that’s kind of scary but she really just wanted someone. And yes, I had a pack of smokes today. It made my head feel really light and clear for a while but then I got really dizzy so I promise to not do that ever again because it doesn’t really help anything, really. It doesn’t even wake you up, it just gives you this killer headache afterwards. The rush while doing it is pretty good but it’s not worth the aftermath. Jonnah has a dark side, huzzah! I call that dark side “Mipie” and hopefully, she stays dead this time.
Anyway, that lady was just really sad. But now I’m scared because what if I end up like her? Going to malls that are really far away from where I live, bumming smokes from random teenagers who don’t quite know how to smoke, asking for free movie tickets from strangers, and being really sad about the world. If I was still Mipie, that probably would be the case. Praise God, I’m back on track and I’m back on His way.
- Panel Interview for HoW because we were nominated for best publication, wooptidingledoo!
- Pre-prod (sort of) for the short film.
- Stay in Powerbooks (on the floor, in between two of the shelves with Young Adult fiction) for four and a half hours, reading Perks of Being a Wallflower because I also finished Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler), while waiting for Jared Mario for the continuation of pre-prod.
- Slight depressive stance because I had just read The Perks of Being a Wallflower and made it until p.150 before the store closed on me.
- Pre-prod (sort of) in Jollibee until 2 in the morning.
Sometimes, I’m just really awkward.
I seriously need a manual that can tell me how to not be a socially awkward turtle because that is, quite literally, what I am just about 95% of the time when I’m not with a group of people I’ve entirely comfortable with. Honestly, I don’t understand how two people can get along so well in the span of just meeting each other after like… ten minutes. I don’t get it. How do you friendly? How do you social? It’s a foreign concept to me, honestly. I want to be friendly. I don’t want to be awkward. I’m perfectly fine with being weird because being weird is cool but seriously. How do you converse with people? Is there an app for that? Where can I download it?
- The maid finally confessed that she’s pregnant, hooray! She’s six months in and she’s getting sacked soon. Apparently, she shacked it up with some construction worker nearby, which is just mental because we all believed that her boyfriend lived a plane ride away. We’ve known since December actually, but she won’t own up to it. She just kept going on about how she’s just naturally “huge” or whatever. Rubbish.
- I’m late to my WRITING class again. In which we have to listen through a three hour monologue.
- Professor didn’t show up for Video Production. Wonderful.
- Rest up a bit when I got home.
- Prepare for panel interview
The whole maid thing really did get me up. I mean, this girl. She’s only a few years older than me and one time, she asked me what a porkchop was. She was wired with my mother knowing that this girl apparently had finished high school. … Really, now? You spell “pineapple” as “pineapol” and you expect us to believe you graduated high school? Do you think we’re idiots?
But honestly, I feel sorry for this girl now. She wanted to have the baby aborted but 1.) she’s already six months in and she didn’t quite know about that 2.) she’s convinced herself that if she denies that she’s pregnant, then she won’t be (those are my mother’s words, not mine) 3.) you haven’t even gone to a check up the entire time you’ve been pregnant. You just had those test kit things and now you’re already six months in and you want to kill your unborn baby.
And now I’m just thinking - look at where the lack of education has brought this girl. Working at a flea market selling DVDs for an abusive boss, my mum sneaks her out so she can work for us and she has been for about three years already, and then this happens. In the entire span that she’s been working here, I’ve gathered that she’s only graduated the third grade or so, she does not understand a word of English, she copies my sister’s clothing style (and by extension, mine [I mean, she has a collection of owl necklaces now]), et cetera. She didn’t know! She didn’t know the consequences of pre-marital sex, she didn’t know the consequences of unprotected pre-marital sex, she doesn’t know how to lie, she doesn’t know how to be a mother, and there are about a million things she doesn’t know! I feel sorry for her kid, honestly. This woman is a five year old girl trapped in a twenty one year old woman’s body.
Educate your people! Education is extremely important, okay. Just, bah! I don’t care where you came from, who you are, or how much your family earns - everyone is entitled to an education! It’s a basic human right! It angers and saddens me when things like this happen to people who don’t know any better. Ignorance will be the undoing of this society.
(This is why I’d like to think I’m mostly Erudite but still Divergent because Candor and Abnegation, if you speak Divergent!fandom).
- Getting a good NetSim evaluation. ”Very impressive”.
- Seeing Mirror, Mirror and having a pre-production meeting with Jared Mario.
- He flirts with the Chowking cashier lady. That’s a significant event because seriously, this woman had her bloody knickers in a twist and she was blushing so brightly, it wasn’t even funny. And he knew exactly what he was doing to this poor lady, my goodness.
- That’s it, basically. That was my day.
Honestly, getting that good NetSim grade was the most overwhelming part of my day. To have my professor, who had probably had hundreds of students pass her by, compare my show to her past students and say “Out of all of the religious talk shows - yours was the first one that actually did it right.” I just wanted to cry out because oh my gosh, so many feelings! I did a Christian radio show with the target audience of people aged 15-25 and are in the middle to upper lower class. It was an amazing, amazing feeling - to have her say that she was “very impressed”. For this show, I had missed all of my rehearsal dates and I wrote the script literally hours before the network simulation, it was totally bollocks. I was so nervous for it and I kept fumbling with the equipment and in the middle of my show, the USB stopped functioning and it was all insane and all that. Still, kept my cool and played with what I got. I had my friend AJ on the show and he gave a short testimony for my show, which was pretty cool. My friend, Timo, even burned my CD for my ambiance music, which was required. AJ even led the show in prayer before air time, which was just amazing.
It’s amazing. Look at what God has accomplished through silly little me. My professor told me that I had a voice made for radio (hihihihi) and that she was very impressed with me and that I had made it to Television Production for next term. I think it’s what those people in American Idol feel once they’ve gotten a golden ticket. God got me through this show and it was His strength in me that got me through it all. Look at the fruit of keeping your integrity with Christ. It will always end up better than you could have ever dreamed. Praise Him!
Also, you must know that I read this all in my head with a British accent.
1/7 »
