The 5 Stages of Grief

This post is not what you're thinking.
However, I am currently grieving my evident loss of sleep.

Today, my group and I met up at Victoria's house, as we often do, to discuss the ideas gained from our peers during our in-class group meetings on Friday. In light of this, Fabiana shared an amazing idea, proposed by another one of our classmates (thanks Conner!), that we are planning to incorporate within the story line of our film opening. As I have previously discussed, the pace of our film opening speeds up as the "impending doom" of our main character's situation quickly approaches via her phone battery dying. This will be depicted as her phone goes from 5% , and with each intensifying sequence, drops until it gets to 1%. While discussing this concept, Connor proposed to Fabi that it would be interesting to portray the 5 stages of grief within our character while simultaneously showing her phone dying. This juxtaposition of her experiencing the stages of grief with the dying of her phone makes our approach in our portrayal of our narrative more unique and authentic. It, likewise, acts as a method of getting our audience to better empathize with the main character and what she is emotionally going through by visually stating each stage with the correlating battery percent.

Stage 5: Denial - 5%
With each stage, we have planned to create a freeze frame with a sound motif to signal not only the change in grief, but the fall in battery percent. Additionally, we have written the script to mimic that of the main character's thoughts in the form of a voice over. Within the voice over, she will be explaining how she struggled to learn about the 5 stages of grief in class, but how she can finally understand the concept.

Stage 4: Anger - 4%
In the anger sequence, we will use a series of shaky camera movements and fast cuts to change the sudden tone of the scene. Close-ups of confrontation will be used to depict her resistance to the situation she has been forced into.

Stage 3: Bargaining - 3%
Small pieces of dialogue will portray the bargaining aspects of grief such as begging to let her [the main character] go or trading things for her freedom. Additionally, behaviors such as bringing the hands together in prayer will be shown to show her desperation in finding a way out, even by turning to her religion.



Stage 2: Depression - 2%
The mise-en-scene elements of this scene will reflect that of the stage. The saturation will gradually lower as well as the small pops of blue that we have chosen to include to symbolize sex trafficking awareness.


Stage 1: Acceptance - 1%
Acceptance is not only the last step within the stage of grief, but it is the last visual/scene being portrayed within our film opening. Its significance is that it is essentially the start to the main character's story and is the gateway to the start of the plot.