Fiction Adaptation: Ideas

Whilst browsing on the internet to find ideas for my project, I started to consider doing a poem instead of a graphic novel for my fiction adaptation. I decided to search for poems by Jim Morrison; lead singer of The Doors, I had knowledge that he had written poems before so I had a look to see what kind of things he had write. I found a few poems written by him however this one stood out the most for me.

It was the greatest night of my life
Although I still had not found a wife
I had my friends right there beside me
Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding
Ghosts crown the young child's fragile eggshell mind
We scaled the wall
We tripped thru the graveyard
Ancient shapes were all around us
No music but the wet grass felt fresh beside the fog
Two made love in a silent spot
one chased a rabbit into the dark
A girl got drunk & made the dead
And I gave empty sermons to my head
Cemetery cool & quiet
Hate to leave
your sacred lay
Dread the milky coming of the day

The moment I read this several ideas popped into my head of what I could do and how much I could play around with it. It's called "Graveyard Poem" and is about Morrison hanging around in a cemetery with his friends but I plan to not take the poem literally and plan to add my own twist to it.

Fiction Adaptation: Introduction

Today was our first day back to uni, and we found that our first project was going to be the Fiction Adaptation. In this unit we will have to take a Fictional piece of work and create a five minuet film out of it, aswell as a written assignment which includes an essay. As students we have to choose appropriate material for our adaptation, we can choose from: Poems, Short stories and Graphic Novels/ Comic Strips.
I have personally chosen to recreate a Graphic novel (to be more specific manga), because I read a lot of graphic novels I feel that I can create something really interesting and put my own spin on it. As to what graphic novel I am going to choose, I have not come up with an idea, however today I shall research what story I feel I can put my all into and hopefully really be experimental with!

Commission Unit: Filming at a Yu-Gi-Oh Trading card event

Every three months Graham hosts a Yu-Gi-Oh! card game event in a small pub in Maidstone. In these events he usually gets a turn out of about 20 to 30 people since he had to stop doing weekly tournaments (because no one turned up). Graham gave us permission to film this tournament so we went to the pub to gather footage of Graham and contestants for this tournament. There was quite a low turn out for the tournament this time round as there were only a turn out of 10 people but this was only bad for Graham as he made a £5 loss from the event. Filming wise we got some good footage of the games as well as some interviews with Graham and some of the tournament entries. Before we finished we handed out consent forms for people that we interviewed and for people who were caught on camera. Overall I think we got some good footage and we got to see more of what Graham does in his spare time as well as how he feels about the money he generated from that day compared to other days.

James

Narrative and Genre Unit: Research

I have been taking quotes from various books that I borrowed from the library which I feel add to the essay. These books include "Media, Culture and Morality", "Samurai Film" "The Cult Film Reader" and "Comic Book Movies" All of these books will be able to relate to "Death Note" which is why I have chosen them.

Narrative and Genre Unit: Writing the essay

Over the last couple of weeks I have been compiling my essay for this unit. So far I have conducted research into Japanese films, the detective genre, culture and morality and narrative. So far my essay word count adds up to 653 so I still have quite a lot to write however I still have a lot to write about!

Commission Unit: Filming at The Grinning Demon: November 8th

On Thursday we went back to Maidstone town centre to film at the Grinning Demon to film some actuality shots and ask Graham some more questions about his business. In this we had Graham talking to us about his business whilst he put comics in plastic sleeves and stacked the shelves, not only did he talk us through this he also talked to us about some of the customers and regulars that come into the store and how much he makes in a day.

Whilst we we filming the shop flooded with customers, which meant that this was one of his good days. We took this opportunity to film these customers whilst they were being served and browsing the shop. In total we had a good day we got a variety of shots and interviews and we were pretty pleased with ourselves.

Commission Unit: Filming with Graham: 12th November

On Monday me and Sam went to the Grinning Demon again to ask Graham some more questions for the documentary. These questions included how he felt when he first bought the store, how the store was run when Manny was there and others which are quite similar. As it was near closing time we filmed Graham closing up the store as part of a sequence which potentially could be used as the closing scene in the documentary.