Setting up the story and character exploration

 

The Themes

Getting started on our film was very natural, The director already had an idea before the group was created and they explained it to the rest of the group and all of us liked it. we were very eager to film so we decided our group members and were already workshopping the story since December. The first thing we had to do was to figure out the story and Themes. Our director had the idea of a film where a character has a crippling obsession with bugs and by the end of the movie, the character becomes their obsession.

The character obsession include insect taxidermy and entomology which he writes in a journal.

The Questions

With that idea we started going more in-depth,  asking questions to each other and talking to evolve the story more, Questions like Why would he turn into a bug, what kind of bug, is the change only physical does it affect his brain? answering helped to define the themes of our film. And conversations about what type of story we wanted to tell and why we wanted to make this film helped the group be at a similar place of understanding,

In the end we chose the theme of obsession and how it takes over someone's life. And the transformation into a bug was a physical depiction  which would truly show how bad an obsession can get to the audience. It also wouldn't just physical but his brain would also be affected as the film would show that the character has problems being part of the real world instead of thinking about the bugs.And that specific bug would be a Cicadas!

Why Cicadas?

Cicada from brood XIX.A brood that takes 13 years to emerge.

Our director pointed out that this year two Cicadas brood will emerge after 13 and 17 years of waiting. This is very special as the University of Connecticut  periodical cicada information page explains the uniqueness of this year. So it felt right for a character to be interested with bugs to become obsessed with such a special event.

The university of Connecticut's periodical information pages: The 2024 periodical cicada emergence.

https://cicadas.uconn.edu/
 

We also decided that the main character would be a guy to show male mental health which is highly underrepresented in media. Specifically a man who is not an antagonist or morally evil that still has mental health problems, we wanted to represent how most time men's mental health are more dangerous to themselves than to the public.

With the power of Passion

We decided on this theme and central idea even before starting to talk in class about the film. Our excitement and the sense of passion we have to make this film made it that we got ahead and started planning it without even thinking about it as an assignment. This film doesn’t feel like an obligation or an assignment but a project between friends who want to make something they’ll be proud of. And there is no greater motivation to make something good than to have a passion for it. There will definitely be hurdles and bad moments in the production process but remembering the fact that this film is something we care about will help us jump those hurdles.