We are scheming

 After a few classes of going back and forth with my group members, I think we've finally landed on an idea we all really seem to like!

Background

A little bit of background for our idea, essentially it all emerged when Nicole was scrolling through Instagram and stumbled upon a video from "etymologynerd". For those who don't know, as the name probably implies... Etymology nerd is a social media content creator that is a nerd! for etymology! (I know very groundbreaking naming conventions). I digress, essentially the video looks at the communication seen on bathroom walls through a sociological and linguistic lens that discusses the way that the bathroom is essentially a completely distinct style of communication. The main things that make it unique are the anonymity and community involvement leading to "death of the author" and a kind of communal feel to what is on the walls and the consequent pure unadulterated privacy that leads to people being completely unfiltered in their thoughts. The second thing that makes it so unique is the gendered aspect of bathrooms. As a result, messages are perceived and communicated in an entirely new and unique social space divorced from other genders. 

Taking these aspects in my mind, we thought it would be really interesting to play with the unique gender conditions to create a same-sex love story that develops through the bathroom walls, but we weren't exactly sure where we wanted to take it...

Nicole's inspiration for the idea.

Class Discussions

So, the other day in class we gathered up in our little pod and got to talking and we begin to talk about the ideas that we had created. We essentially just started yapping as we tried to get to the bottom of what at the root of our story would really make it special. 

At first, there were two main roots we could go with our project. First, go funny and romcomy(?) This was actually the initial idea Nicole had, go for a kind of fun indie romcom vibe. I mean, there is some inherent comedy in a love story emerging out of a restroom, this could definitely be interesting. 

Second, was my first inkling which was to go more dramatic 'romance' (not really romance) kind of sad deep reflective retrospective indie film. Kind of like a 500 days of summer, Past Lives, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind, maybe even some elements of a Moonlight (keep these in mind for blog research later!): essentially films that are about love but not really 'love stories'. Those films that replace the picture perfect storybook endings with emotionally complex realistic depictions of the complexity that comes with love and romance, the hidden reality not often discussed.

We got to discussing and began to think about the dynamics of the relationship of the two people on the bathroom walls. One of the interesting things that we wanted to address, was how the setting was going to impact the story. We didn't want it to just be a gimmick, but to examine how it meaningfully impacted the interactions of the characters. We ended up realizing that the private setting would be great at exploring how people's actions can be different outside of the prying eyes of society and examine the cognitive dissonance between how they act in private versus in public. As a result we ended up going more towards the second option. One of the ideas for this option was to make one of our characters queer, but unable to accept their identity and as a result in public resort to violence and bullying towards other queer individual. The other one would be openly queer, and in the open bullied by the other character. This would analyze the queer experience through the lens of two characters who confront it in very different ways and see what happens when those two clash in strange circumstances and fall in love. 

Planning document 

We got caught up in very delightful fruitful discussions as we often do, and before we forgot absolutely everything we discussed, we had a brilliant idea, actually write things down! So, we got to work in creating a shared document to share all our ideas and document everything we had just discussed.

 In previous projects, such as the documentary project, it has often been the case where we have had a lot of great ideas but they've been kind of scattered. In those cases even when we have been able to write them down a lot of the times they have been placed into a bunch of different documents and we haven't shared them with eachother. This led to a lot of great planning that was broken down by poor communication. 

This time we wanted to ensure everything was communicated and well connected from the beggining! So after I opened a google docs and blurted out everything we had discussed my group members immediately urged me to share the document with them. Soooo uncharacteristically in accordance with my new years resolutions I did not procrastinate pressing those extra two buttons and immediately went on share. Nicole added some highlights and we did some formatting and now these ideas wont fade off into the ether and instead have a home on google cloud services!