Creative Critical Reflection Phoebe Houle Dawn

1. How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Our film is in the romantic drama genre Our film is in the romantic drama genre. It follows other dramatic romances that we researched before beginning in that the opening starts out with a little bit of mystery and suspense, as well as tragedy. However, it mostly challenges conventions, because in the beginning scene, Elizabeth finds out she’s being cheated on rather than a love scene. Our scene also establishes a plot very early on, and in the movies we had watched, there was mostly an artsy introduction to show one character reading or rowing a boat. However, it was similar to the other title scenes in that ours included music rather than dialouge, which was similar to others.

The social groups that our movie appeals to are young adults who go through heartbreak. It deals with issues such as death, love, relationships, and trust issues. This thus appeals to anyone who has felt pain because of these problems, which is most people, especially young people. It also touches upon social issues like teen pregnancy and texting and driving, and the dangers of both of those.

2. How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

I believe that the relatable plot will attract the audience the most I believe that the relatable plot will attract the audience the most. It touches on many social issues and conflicts that every human goes through, such as love and loss, as well as unique circumstances like teen pregnancy and cheating. Because the plot contains many common problems people can relate to, it would attract many people. We decided to have 20th Century Fox distribute our film, as they have distributed many other successful dramas and romances in the past. It would be distributed first at small film festivals and then move to movie theatres around the nation and world. Then, it could go on Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, as well as be available for purchase on DVD.

3. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

In January, when we started working on the final task, I was very much less knowledgeable about the process. After completing this project though, I learned and developed many production skills. I learned how to download music to use for the background and import the video from the camera and back it up on the computer in order to put it into our video timeline. During editing, I learned how to cut film, fade music in and out, and how to use “effects editor” so that our film could run smoothly. We prepared titles that didn’t look too distracting and learned the order we had to put each title in, and when we were done, we learned how to export our video. After that, we learned how to upload it to YouTube, on our very own YouTube Channel. Finally, we learned how to embed the video in the HTML part of WordPress (the website we blogged on). I now feel comfortable in how to fully film, edit, and produce a short film, while adding titles, music, and special effects.

4. How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

We used many technologies to help our project come together: We used the blogging website Wordpress in order to keep track of our experience, as well as upload the final task video using the HTML tab while creating a post. We used Pinnacle Studios to edit our footage and put our final task together, adding audio, video, and special effects. We used the internet to research the history and the art of titles, as well as how romantic dramas typically start out.

We used YouTube to make and account in order to upload our video We used YouTube to make and account in order to upload our video. Then, we used the HTML tab to embed the video to a blog post. We watched free movies and title sequences on websites so that we could be inspired by other films in our genre and see how they started their films. We used a camcorder to film the footage we planned out on our storyboard and helped the movie come together by getting multiple shots of each scene.