AWESOMENESS in the HOUSE!

Video of the Week: LAUREN'S LETTER (with Director's Commentary)

It had been a long and rough road, but it’s finally here and I’m proud to present an original story for our Physics project: Lauren’s Letter.



Writing the story was hard because I had to think of all the factors—location, time, manpower, equipment, how Physics comes into play of everything—everything in the story has to agree with all these factors. The concept was simple. Since we were assigned to concentrate on the Grand Carousel ride in Enchanted Kingdom, all of us in the group agreed on making a love story. Thus, Lauren’s Letter.

There were only two settings for this video: in school and in Enchanted Kingdom, where most of the scenes are shot. The whole video starts as happy and actually a tad High School Musical-inspired, but slowly we start to realize that something had happened that really traumatized the way a high school student shouldn’t have been traumatized. It’s a paradox, young high school students experiencing an adult’s loss, and it is made that way to show that life, no matter how young or old you are, is full of paradoxes.

Each time Christian reminisces his memories with Lauren, this is where we get to ‘read’ the letters through his eyes. The feelings and essence of the letters are in these flashbacks.

His friends also symbolize unity. Having different eccentricities, the three of them, together with Christian and Lauren, had been able to come together as a group, and the three of them decide to help their friend to move on from an inevitable situation. And for me, this is what good friends should do :)

The main agenda was to involve Physics in the story. I had not yet been engaged in Physics-related topics by the time I was writing the script, and so it was kept simple: a box with a lock containing Lauren’s last letter, the lock containing a combination, which was the centripetal acceleration of the carousel. It is honestly the one thing I regret—that I had not involved enough Physics in the story. If only I had been allowed to edit some of the lines I would write cheesey lines involving Physics, just to let the viewers (if there are any) catch a drift of the subject, because that’s the main reason for everything here.

The music also plays a major role through the course of the video. The songs used are familiar to everyone, yet they still underwent through a long selection process to really set the mood right in the scenes.

Ultimately, I made the story end the way it ended, because I believe that when a relationship ends, something new and more beautiful is bound to come into our lives. The wait may be short or long, but there will be always something beautiful in the end. I hope the girl at the end represented that beauty in the viewers’ eyes. :>

Labels: Chofu, Enchanted Kingdom, Lauren's Letter, Physics, school, Senior Year, Video of the Week