The 5 Stages of Grief

    Today in class we discussed mise-en-scene and dialogue. However, we also needed to figure out what exactly we were going to do with the final shot before we start filming. We couldn't tell if we wanted to show Valerie in Mara's position, wearing her sweater or in her room, or if that should be later in the film. We also considered if she could be reading the letter that was written to her. However, we feel like this would be rushing the film, making it look messy. Valerie would look extremely different and it would look too confusing. We also thought of her looking through Valerie's room, as a form of acceptance. 

    The word "acceptance" made us think of the well-known "5 stages of grief". Why not structure the film based on her five stages of grief? This is when Lucia came up with the idea of setting the film up into "chapters", inspired by La La Land breaking the film up into seasons. I also liked this concept; it reminded me of different parts used in Everything Everywhere All At Once. It establishes different points throughout the film, which we could definitely use for ours. We can document Valerie's feelings through each stage, separating them through a black screen and text.

    These 5 stages, originally written by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, are made for people recovering from the death of a loved one. I was able to find an article discussing it here. It showed that the stages are broad for each person, they typically go through different changes, some bigger than others. So, for our film opening, I don't want Valerie to change completely. She would be going through the first stage, denial, and would progress throughout the film. Since each stage would most likely be over 20 minutes in the film, I don't even want to show that much right away with the first clip. I looked for an article (found here) that goes into more depth about denial. Here are some common characteristics I found.

• shock
• emotionally numb
• confusion/disorientation
• shutting down/forgetting about the loss
• staying busy
• mindless behaviors

    I feel like with this, we can make a singular clip that has a similar composition of the shot that we were going to put the title slide in, a medium shot of Mara. We can have a medium shot of Valerie, staring and feeling numb about everything. I'm not sure if we should put music in or not. It would fill the silence, but maybe silence is what is needed in the moment. We could add white noise like what we were going to do with Mara, or add slight music. I was also thinking of keeping Bella in the scene. It shows that she will be a great help during the film. I'll need to discuss this AGAIN with my group. I'll update soon!