Social Experiment- Intro

    Hello. After a long discussion of researching different dystopian openings and some general scenes of dystopian-like pieces, we are closer than ever to establishing our genre to be a dystopia. After the day in class with Isabel and I discussed in the previous blog, I was flooded with ideas and rather conceptual questions that I'm not yet ready to answer but hope to in the process of coming up with a plot/ choosing our approach for the opening, which will begin next week. Being the dedicated notetaker I am, I wrote them down on my notes app, not being able to wait till I had access to pen and paper as I was afraid the ideas would slip from my mind files. This blog post is dedicated to some of those thoughts, and additional discussions with Isabel as we began to get excited about our collaborative project...

Possible Plot Idea

    As we began to think of how we would come up with an inventive and new "dystopian-like" plot, I remembered that in eighth grade, for a Film 1 script writing project, I created a fictional film called "The Social Experiment". While I didn't write nearly the whole script and only a few first scenes, I remember the plot (not fully developed as by eighth-grade self only had the main parts in mind for my assignment): A mother of several children is the manager of a secret company that aims to answer questions through social experiments. The mother also includes her children in this, with Tucan ( I know a weird name) being the lead. The children are all isolated from society and each other, exposed to different resources and limited to outside contact and modern-day technologies. As the time comes, Tucan is finally allowed to go out into the world, but what he doesn't know is that his mom is planting a chip in his backpack to see and track society's responses to his abnormalities (being raised abnormally on purpose). While that's only a very short synopsis, that's the general introductory idea. We will consider portions of this to possibly adapt into our actual film and in effect opening. Below are pictures of the script I made in 8th grade:

                                      

    

    Additionally, bringing this back also reminded me of the scriptwriting platform Celtx.com, which I now know we can use to write the script for this opening.

Social Experiment

    With the idea of a social experiment being introduced, it made me think about real-life social experiments. The Stanford prison experiment, for example, was a 2-week experiment conducted in August of 1971 by Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, displaying/ examining the effects of situational variables on people's (the participants) reactions and behaviors. While I don't yet know too much about this, I plan to watch the movie made about it (called: The Stanford Prison Experiment) and do research to understand just one case study of experiments that have been done so that I can sensitively make decisions about our own possible social experiment. This led me to remember a book I read called The Wave. This book is based on a real incident that happened in Palo Alto California, in 1969, where a high school history teacher- Ron Jones- did an experiment (The Third Wave) to explain how the German population could have accepted the actions of the Nazi Regime during the rise of the Third Reich/ WW2 (1939-1945). Even though I have already read the book I want to research this experiment as well because the more general knowledge I gain about these experiments the more I will have to create a valid social experiment for our plot.

Conclusion

    The inspiration from my younger self for a possible plot idea/ foundation helped Isabel and I start to develop a picture for our whole film, and film opening specifically. For this coming week, I will be researching more about social experiments and looking for possible inspirations from other film openings/ dystopian films to give us a plethora of "colors" to choose from when creating our own ideas. Overall, proud of my 8th-grade self for helping me out!