Blog Post 1: Road to Research

From this point, I began doing preliminary research to see what had already been done on my possible topics. I was originally thinking of doing a project on color in Wes Anderson or Denis Villeneuve films, which had already been done. I found research on scholarly sites for some of these ideas, which helped limit down and focus my project to a couple of ideas. Through this process, I also found multiple sources that would help support my researchable topics, but hadn't been actually researched before. This is how I landed on my topic of examining connections throughout David Lynch films portrayed through the use of objects and character personas. 

For my methodology, I was inspired by a different film study paper that gathered data qualitatively. First, I will construct a table for each film to write down any outstanding connections that I recognize with a short description and its time stamp. I will watch all of the movies once to get a general understanding of the movie and record broad similarities of character personas, objects, or anything else that I find between each film. Then, I will watch them all a second time and record in-depth observations of how these are portrayed and connected between Lynch’s films, as well as how many times they appear. Observations will be recorded for each of the 7 films on separate tables, but used toward the greater data collection. I will then combine all of the tables and their data into a larger table to show the different amounts of references in each of the films. 

Overall, this project could have an immense impact on the film industry. Through my research, other filmmakers can see the connections that Lynch builds between his movies and how those intrigue audiences worldwide. They can become inspired by his methods and utilize them in their own work, creating a new era of Lynchian-inspired films. This could draw audiences’ attention and create popularity among more obscure films, while also promoting more revenue/box office profit from growing interests.