I've actually found this chapter to be one of the most interesting. I haven't considered the ways in which my senses engage with the world I interact with as an indicator of my work ethic. The first point that caught my eye in the chapter was one of the questions in the sensory survey. The question involved the television programming I enjoy and tend to relate with. In all honesty I can't watch television any more. I tend to over think the shows I'm watching and pick them apart to the point where they aren't enjoyable any more. Throughout the past year the same has happened with film. I'll sit in the theater excited for the film, but my learnings in film school and my senses trigger me to look for the worst in my viewing experience. 

     This chapter focuses heavily on scheduling and time management. According to the readings this individual has the organizational skills to lead a team of people. I guess I can't disagree with the statement. I've been in terrible group situations before that were resurrected by one individual who could keep everyone on track and delegate tasks in a timely manner. unfortunately I'm really finding this chapter to be reiterating the same points. Of course the other characteristics I'v discussed in previous blogs had a great relation to my daily life, and in some cases taught me a lesson. Unfortunately this chapter just recounts the fact that it's important for one to write down tasks, keep and agenda and be mindful of their time management. It's incredibly tough to draw some sort of deep understanding from a lesson that at this point in my life seems so trivial. From a young age I've been taught to write down thoughts and even earlier this year several of our professors discussed the value of a journal or personal notebook to record life experiences. 

     In all honesty I feel this style suits my personal needs. The apporpriate changes that I require to be a more organized person and to be successful in my field is perfectly summed up in this chapter.

     Out of all the style types dictated in 'Organizing For Your Brain Type' I feel the Maintaining Style falls the furthest from my personal sensibilities. The first thing I think about when distancing myself from this brain type is the clutter in my room. It's messy, there's clothes on the floor and collections of things on my desk and dresser tops. Although it looks messy and is clearly unorganized, I know the location of everything. Through my own inconsistencies I am organized. Quite often by following the rules of the maintaining style I will actually lose tracks of things. If I meticulously place a note for myself in a place that is obvious and out in the open I actually will disregard it and not spot it. the same goes for organizing objects. By putting things in the right place I actually inhibit my ability to find them. i don't know why this works for me, but it does and I keep doing it. Maybe it's my harmonizing brain type that thrives with change and the bustle of my room and life. In fact just the other day rather then typing a note for myself to edit a specific photo for a client I simply took the oven mitten from the kitchen and put it in the middle of my bed. When I returned home from shooting for a different client the oven mitt cued me to remember because of the absurdity of it's location.

     After carefully recording my findings from the Organizing style quiz I found myself to be a 'Harmonizing Style' type person. or at least that is what the article dictates I am. I glanced through the other 3 styles to see if the book got me right and in all honesty the harmonizing style falls the closest to my sensibilities, that's not to say it's completely exact though. 
     The harmonizing style seems to bring out the liberalism in me. As it states i am a compassionate person and voice my opinions often. I try to communicate often and use that to solve situations and negotiate with peers. That isn't to say I thrive in social environments. On one hand I work amongst many people each weekend at nightclubs, and I love to network with the crowd and make new friends. On the other hand if i were to choose between completing an assignment with a group or on my own I would choose the latter. 
     Where it really pegs me right is when it talks about thriving in energy and a lifestyle with commotion can be my downfall. I tend to undertake way too many things at once, and with my ongoing anxiety issues these events can easily pile up and become more cumbersome. My time management skills can be horrible sometimes as I have an obsession with doing so much at once. My mind tends to get clouded with ambition and thoughts that don't come to fruition.
     When looking at the other styles I feel like I'm in the negative batch of character traits. The three other choices seem to be very organized and well put together.  Reading the description to the harmonizing type makes me think the book is saying "you are different and aren't very organized, but it's okay to be different". Unfortunately most of the liberally social traits don't help with organizing work.

     One of the most tense subjects I can think of is war. Some of the films that come extremely close to my sensibilities are one's like Children of Men and 28 Days Later. These two movies specifically take the idea of a war torn location and throw combatants and regular people into stressful and thrilling situations. Keeping with that theme I've decided to create a horror film during the Afghan war. Yes I have no way of filming this, yes it can't be made into a thesis project necessarily and I totally understand that it's an idea I'll never get to see come to fruition. But the location is so exciting to write about. A war in itself is horrifying and scary, but to throw my beloved characters into that situation along with something supernatural would make an extremely tense situation. It's tough to write a character driven fictional film when that's not exactly what 
     In earlier blogs I wrote about comradory and family along with the themes of duty. I feel like those character archetypes fit perfectly for a soldier at war. The three main influencing events on my main character would be the death of his mother, the death of a fellow soldier, and his father leaving at an early age. These three events set up a man who is lonely and abandoned yet can find family and consolement in his squad or amongst his peers. I've really wanted to write about ghosts of lost family members and also a story about being lost in the physical environment. I've had so many terrifying dreams that are filled with anxiety about being lost and not knowing where I am. Therefore I could create a rewarding yet creepy story about a soldier meeting long lost ghosts while abandoned in the middle of the Afghan mountains. This could create a really rewarding, personal adventure for the lead character, but also give the supporting cast an opportunity to help him deal with these inner demons, and physical ones.

Storyline Inspiration
     In a filmic world I can't see a horror protagonist relating themselves to or being inspired by a figure. Perhaps one could say that god or a deity may drive a character to success or defeat in a horror film, but I don't want a religious protagonist in my film. The absence of faith works for me. The only other motivating figure I see for this sort of protagonist is a heroic one. Perhaps a comic book hero or someone strong and triumphant will help the protagonist see the change they can make and help them succeed in a scary or tense situation.

Filmic Inspiration
     I would love to write a character who is motivated by duty and living up to their role in a community, workplace or family. I personally enjoy the character of Brody in Jaws. PLayed by Roy Schnieder this troubled father and husband has family issues and problems living up to the duty of being chief of police in a small community. The entire film he's trying to make a difference and find that missing satisfaction in his life that can only be brought to him when his peers take him seriously. I don't consider Jaws to be a horror film, but it sure is tense. I love the rewarding ending to Brody's story as well. He saves the day single handedly and presumably the battle with the shark actually brings him closer to his family and coworkers. I recently attended a screening of Paranormal Activity 4 and also a film called Sinister. Both films ended with the protagonists being killed and defeated with no moral satisfaction or lesson being taught. I personally want to see the hero of the film succeed and want to see them overcome something scary, tense or even supernatural, and I bet viewers do 

     I think the one thing that differs with my idea of a horror protagonist is the sensibility of their reactions to the events they are thrown into. Horror films are filled with circumstantial plot points that build on one core theme. Generally the tense nature of the film will heighten each time one of these 'protagonist meets conflict' situations happen. My protagonist is male, in their late 20's and in all rights is a regular guy. I'm building a story out of the solutions to faults I find in most current horror films today. One of my most favorite horror and thriller protagonists is Mcready, Kurt Russels character in The Thing. He's a young male and acts naturally to everything that happens to him. He's sarcastic and relatable. So many current horror films and series have young, conflicted teen characters that just scream and act without rational to their circumstances. I can't stand those characters. Rather then writing a script from a story I've read, or a drama with some deep character building plot, I really want to throw an everyman protagonist into a horror film filled with dashes of the right ingredients to create a satisfying vibe that is both tense and scary. I actually look forward to describing the people who influence my character. Maybe I'm doing this in the reverse of what most horror writers do. In all honesty most horror and thriller films seem to make the focal point and element of the film the antagonist and not actually the protagonist. Or in a horror film is the protagonist actually the antagonist? Is Freddy the guy who the audience roots for? Does the audience really care about Roy Shnieders character in Jaws, or are they really fixated on how come this shark is terrorizing the beach dwelling population? 

     In all honesty I planned my fourth year thesis piece to be a documentary film. For about a year now I’ve wanted to create a film about the change in music booking at events halls and nightclubs in town. I actually found an interesting subject recently that would help me to further translate the story using one person central to the narrative. He’s actually a real estate wiz who developed nightclubs in New York city for several years and then moved shop to Toronto to attempt at building a club culture around a new venue concept he had. Unfortunately his style and way of thinking couldn’t keep up the the changing pace in the music industry and the place went bankrupt and was renovated under a new (and extremely successful) ownership. Alas this personal project does not fit into the confines of this assignment and looking at the future blog postings outlined I would not be able to comment on the criteria because of the nature of a documentary.

     Recently I’ve been watching horror films non stop. I can’t say they are good one’s, but to fit the Halloween season they seem to be the cool thing to watch on a weekday evening. I’ve come to understand that nearly all of these films are unsuccessful in either keeping my attention or scaring me. Being a film student we tend to look at movies in a completely different light, but I think all viewers can understand the low brow style of recent ‘scary movies’. I’ve really wanted to develop a strong protagonist. Someone who can really connect with the viewer, be relatable, and most importantly realistic. There’s a huge stigma with horror films that the protagonists reaction to the situation is always unnatural and they do things that no right minded person would do. I understand for narrative sake characters need to perform specific actions to move the story onward, but in my experience I find the realism of a situation to be much more captivating for me at least. I’ve got a perfect male lead in mind who relates to some of my favorite horror protagonists in many ways. Secondly I’ve been discussing with my acting graduate roommate the styles and tones that make a successful horror film for weeks now. I’ve got loads of notes and tidbits of info to add to these next blogs from my film notepad and I look forward to turning this personal project into something much larger and hopefully develop a nice script from it.

     I’ve been asked to describe my stance on Canadian film and television production. Not necessarily the industry and production of the material, but the end product which we would view on our televisions or in a theater. I could possibly make a couple people angry by saying this but I honestly hate television programming.  I find the majority of it heartless, mindless and gutless. We live in an age where the gap between prime time drama shows and prime time reality shows are so varied in quality. Sure there’s extremely popular shows out there like Breaking Bad and Mad Men which are extremely well written and entertaining. I totally support this thought provoking material, but the amount of shows that are of this calibre are few and far between. The rest of television is dominated with simple reality shows. The majority programs rely on objective viewing as the producers attempt to be introspective about the flavor of the month singer, the impoverished southern family, or the latest celebrity gossip.  You could divide the entirety of television programming into two categories that I’ve taken the liberty of titling “Hey smart people watch this” and “Hey look at these people doing this stuff”. There’s nothing in between any more. Years ago the prime time spots were taken up with sitcoms which were funny and low brow but had great writing and a whole lot of heart put into them. Now there’s nothing in between. It’s like a debate between the low class and the upper class. We don’t have an even distribution of programming left.

     I realize I have not touched on the Canadian end of this programming yet. As far as film goes I really do feel that actual Canadian productions don’t make it big outside of art house theaters and the only notoriety Canadian film really reaches is through french films which claim some credit with a specific audience. I may be coming off as an ignorant complacent viewer but in all honesty I don’t enjoy Canadian film. The Red Violin comes to mind when I think of large Canadian productions that I’ve viewed in the past. It’s a drama, but that’s about it. There’s a boat load of criticisms that I could list to accompany my review of that film but I clearly don’t have the space to include it in my rantings. I don’t enjoy Cronenberg material too much, and I haven’t seen many independent Canadian films that have really captivated me. 

     Canadian television programming in my eyes is pretty poor. Most of it over exemplifies it’s Canadian roots, much like many films do. There seems to be a forced effort in it to point out that the characters prefer curling over typical American sports, as one example. Comedy specials that forcibly display Canadian figures, historical shows that over glorify Canadian past, and dramas that are just too humble to spark a sign of importance. My final gripe with Canadian television is that if it isn’t attempting to be overly Canadian in style, it completely rides on the coat tails of American programming. Canadian entertainment shows and reality series are carbon copies of American series that are already low brow enough as it is.