COPE

By Angel Vega

Based on non-fictional experiences

I will start off the film with an interview, and slowly the film will start to distort, switching from
documentary, to an experimental. The experiment being the imitation of sensory overload,
uncontrolled and unstable emotions, and realistic, natural emotions from soberness with the use
of visual and audio effects. I will use the detailed descriptions given by the family members and
make it reality. These descriptions are very important to the life of the film, as it allows me to
accurately represent what they experience, and the audience to understand what they feel
through the visuals I create from those descriptions. For example, if I asked my cousin how it felt
to be drunk, and he responds with, "I usually see 3 of the same person", I'd utilize that brief
description, and portray that through the use of visual effects. I want my audience to understand
that these are experiences that people go through, and the only way I can do that is by
experimenting with the scenery, descriptions, and effects. The film will switch gears
simultaneously, interrupting the interview section of the film, and the audio will start to muffle,
and the effects will start coming in. Each topic having different types of effects to simulate them.

The interview that starts the film, will be me asking an abundance of questions to my cousin
who has experienced smoking weed and being high. I will ask questions such as, "What do you
experience when smoking weed? Does it affect you in any way physically or mentally during,
and after you smoke? What made you start, and will you ever return to the sober life?" During
the small portion of the interview, gears will start to shift. The audio will get distorted as he
continues to describe his experience, and will switch from a documentary interview, to an
experimental demonstration of his experience using the description he gave.

(the visuals will take over with his voice in the background).

I will act out how it feels to be high, and the possible reasons to why someone would want to be
high, whether that be personal issues, stress from school, or the addiction to the drowsiness,
through my acting and use of distorted visual effects. If my cousin decides to give his own
personal reasons on why he smokes, and allows me to interpret those reasons in my film, then I
will use his story and put it up to display through my capstone film.

The character will be rolling up a blunt of prop weed, with flashbacks of scenes or audios
that represent the issues and or reasons to why the character smokes. These issues or
reasons are based on the backstory to why my cousin smokes. The character will then
smoke and he will be in a specific setting, and based off what my cousin describes.

I will then ask a different cousin who is willing to share their experiences, on how it feels to be
drunk and why they choose to drink. This cousin will be anonymous, due to the fact that they do
not want to be shown, or heard in the film. I will play an audio of my own voice reading out what
my cousin wrote down as their experiences in being drunk. I will distort my voice in a way where
no one will know who it is, but also keeping it audible enough for the audience to understand
what is being said.

As the actor, who is high, continues his life, he will eventually come across alcohol, and
drinks it to ease more situations that he thinks about, based off of my anonymous
cousin's experiences and reasons to why they drink.

At this point of the film, the description that my anonymous cousin gave about being drunk will
make its way in. Research from the NIAAA says that being drunk physically slows down the
body and damages the brain because the alcohol interferes with the brain's communication
pathways. The consumer can react differently to the alcohol depending on who that may be, and
some people become emotional, as in angry, distressed, or maybe even happy. Therefore,
depending on what my cousin says; if they become emotionally unstable, or angry, as said
before, I will display such experience with the use of special visual effects like tripling a persons
vision, blurry and distorted effects, a variety of shots like a distorted first person shot to show
how the person cant focus, worm's eye shots to demonstrate how the drunk person functions,
and extreme close-ups to show the effects of alcohol, like wide pupils. Audio will be very
muffled, because from my own personal experience, people are drunk tend to be less aware of
their surroundings. They hear a lot less because they are focused on whatever makes them
happier, like more alcohol.

The actor eventually starts being more aware, but almost too aware, and has a sensory
overload. The actor blacks out because of the excessive alcohol, thus calming down the
film, and he wakes up to a sober reality.

The very last part of my film will be about the reality of being sober. Many people make it out to
be joyful, others make it out to be saddening, others just live it out and call it a mixture of
emotions. In order to demonstrate this, I will record my own life. I am a sober person, therefore,
since I'm the actor of my film, I can take advantage of that and show how a sober person deals
with the consequences of reality such as repetitiveness, or personal issues. A sober person also
can be gifted with occasional breaks off of work, a vacation, or just being joyful without the use
of drugs or alcohol. This section of the film will throw many different situations at once like being
stressed about school, the feeling of getting paid, the joy of learning new things, or the
depressing result of dealing with personal issues. In reality, people are very unaware and don't
pay attention to the more important things because they are surrounded by a repetitive
tessellation of issues, or they become lazy and accept whatever consequence happens to them
because of the lack of energy from dealing with multiple different problems at the same time.

With the demonstration of the feelings of being drunk, high, and sober being completed, the film
will slowly end in a fade. This will allow the audience to take in the film and make up their own
morals. Though I do hope for the audience to understand what people go through whenever
they do these things. I also want them to be impressed by my cinematography and video editing
skills because although it is a school project, editing and camera work is something I'm
experienced in, and it's what I'm experimenting with throughout the entire film. I'm attempting
things I don't usually do, and I'm trying to learn new and better effects and colors.