My senior thesis film is a musical narrative that tells the story of a barista experiencing a Deja Vu moment with one of her customers. My inspiration behind the film is La La Land as it is my favorite movie and I believe that the world needs more musicals and sound focused movies.

Being a film and music student, and not so good at writing dialogue, I turned to the direction of making a musical for my thesis a year prior to taking the class. I started to listen to more musical numbers and watching a lot of “Behind the scenes of…” and “The making of,,,” videos of musical films to prepare for my own production. I am so happy that I was able to make a light, silly movie with dance, music being an integral part of the storytelling, and I got to do this with all my friends.

A big part of my movie is the question of “what is real?”. My main character Juli meets Jones, a customer of hers at the coffee shop, and he asks her out. We then see the development of the relationship, from an awkward first date to getting married. As the church bell rings, the audience and Juli all go back to the shop of the initial interaction between the characters. At the end, Jones does ask Juli out. The questions of “what is real” and the Deja Vu moment were heavily inspired by the end scene of La La Land, as well as my personal experience as I love to daydream, and I had a personal experience at my work at a restaurant, except my customer did not ask me out.