Flowers for the Chameleon

 

INTRO

 

We took a leap to see what would happen if a person could change their sex and sexual orientation at will. We created a character who could autonomously change gender upon seeking a target of companionship. If he saw a gay female he would become a gay female, if he identified somebody as straight male he would become a straight female. By given this almost superhuman ability of changing we wanted to explore what were the issues that would still adversely affect this person, akin to finding the kryptonite of our protagonist, his one weakness that bought him the most pain.

We identified the plight of all people despite gender and sexual orientation was rejection from their person of interest. Just by being gay straight bi or trans does not guarantee you a partner. The search of companionship is a shared dilemma among queers and straights and the risk of rejection is huge in all of us. That was the universal factor we wanted to leverage to seek the sympathy from our audience, because who ever we are in terms of our interests, we are all familiar with rejection of some kind.

 

 

CRAFT

 

Flowers for the Chameleon was intricately storyboarded because we wanted a steady flow in between the gender/sexual transitions. We had planned every shot from reactions to close-ups, which was necessary considering we had a very complicated narrative within a short four to five minutes. The shoot lasted for two days at different times in compliance with the schedules of our cast members.

Our biggest technical challenge was to effectively create a transition between the male and female version of the characters and make people believe that it was the same person. Being amateurs at special effects we originally decided to shoot a close up of the protagonist violently shaking his/her head and zoom in to the point of blurred abstraction and fade to a similar extreme close up shot of the other person shaking his/her head and zooming out to reveal the change. We later added some effects on adobe premier as added cosmetics in order to further smoothen and mystify the transition.

 

 

SEQUITUR

Once we had established that rejection was the one thing that bound everybody together despite their gender/sexuality, we had identified our starting point. But the question was where did we want to take these repeated actions of rejection? How did we want to end our story? How does our protagonist deal with rejection, which leads to the question of how should we deal with rejection as people in general. The answer was clear, it came down to loving oneself as being the antidote to all misfortunes. We wanted our protagonist to rise out of his dilemma of being unwanted by his realization of his love for himself and armed with that, he has a reason to further seek his happiness.

 

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