PRE-PRODUCTION; 5 STAGES OF GRIEF

After showing my group, Katie and Laura, the basic idea i have come up with, i am happy that they both like it. Straight away when showing Laura she expressed interest in particular scenes and says she instantly had ideas on how she would shoot certain aspects. It can be quite daunting to show other people your ideas, especially when it is to people that will be helping to develop and eventually bring the idea to reality. Obviously as the project goes on, changes are going to be made and the story we eventually make will probably look a lot different to what it is now, but i am really happy that they like the preliminary idea.

An observation that Laura made, was that she saw a lot of the 5 stages of grief within this story. She had done some research on this topic and believed what i had written linked quite closely to this, so i thought i would research it for myself now. The five stages of grief are a framework that makes up our learning to live without the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we feel when losing someone. What is important to note is that the 5 stages can happen in any order and are not constricted to a linear timeline. 

1) Denial is what helps us survey the loss, within this stage the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming, the mind and body is in a state of shock. Denial helps a person pace their feelings of grief in a way that it can be dealt with, described as 'natures way of only letting in what we can handle'.

2) Anger is a stage that extends to any member of family, friends and strangers. A person may ask 'where is god in this' questioning to everyone why it happened and trying to blame it on other reasons, becoming a distraction 

3) Bargaining is the stage of 'if only', in order to deal with it a person may question whether they could have done something to stop it, whether their actions could have changed the fact. 

4) Depression is when our attention moves to the present. Feelings become empty and this is the stage that feels like it lasts forever. 

5) Acceptance is the final stage, when a person finally overcomes all of their emotional and traumatic feelings and accept what actually happened. 

5 Stages of grief is a really important topic, the fact i wrote something that portrays practically all of these stages of grief without knowing what is was just shows the lack of understanding within the world that we have on these topics. My research thus far has been geared toward mental health issues/symptoms as a reaction to trauma, the reasons i have now looked at this is i believe that we could now weave this into our story in the development stage. 

I feel now i have a good basis of research across the board, my research will obviously continue throughout the unit/project but now is a good time to be exploring the actual idea in more detail. To do next for me is 

-Beginning work on the greenlight pitch for next week

-Contacting charities that may want to be involved/be able to help make sure we are being factually correct
-Starting to draft out a script