Answering CCR Question 2

 Script for second CCR, "How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?"

"The target audience for our coming-of-age film, "18 Before 18" is primarily focused on teenagers and young-adults. Of course, our audience isn't limited to this age group, but we wanted to create something that resonated with older teens who find themselves reaching that edge of adulthood as they head towards the end of their high school career.  Our film adds a unique touch to the coming-of-age genre where our main character Jordyn breaks the fourth wall, interacting with the audience and giving them her inner thoughts to provide a second person perspective which can make the film feel more personal to the audience and give Jordyn more depth as her thoughts and motivations are explored."

"In order to distribute our film to an audience, we felt like the best way to go about it was to upload it on YouTube and also submit it to our local film festivals. We felt that YouTube would be the best place to upload our film because it helps us reach a large audience and we could easily promote the film on our social media pages to ensure our target audience can find the film and access it. We also thought local film festivals would be a great way to share our film because it would help our product find an audience outside of social media. Some of our local film festivals where we'd distribute our film include the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, the Cypress Bay Lighting Film Festival, and the Florida Film Festival which are all great places to start distributing our film to larger audiences."

Florida Film Festival

Starting my CCR

We have finally reached the point in our project where we're wrapping up and can begin working on our individual Critical Creative Reflection. Although I'm excited to being so close to done, I can't believe how much time has passed and how much our group has accomplished in the last six weeks. With only two weeks left to work on this portfolio project, I've begun brainstorming some ideas for how I want to present my CCR. Although I do already have some ideas, I feel like they're a little ambitious for the time we have left to work on the CCR, so I might have to go back to brainstorming so I can create something doable with my time limit. My original idea was to do some sort of talk show where I played both the host and interviewee to create something more fun and creative.

The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon

Again, not sure how I plan to execute this and the idea might change completely if I can come up with something more feasible,  but for now I wanted to create a script so I could have the question answered at least and make brainstorming easier.

Script for first CCR, "How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?" :

"Our film is a Coming-of-Age film which follows pretty much the same themes of the genre. We wanted to utilize characteristics shared in other coming-of-age films like themes of personal growth and change, as well as characters facing some sort of challenge for the first time in their life where they have to make a choice that highlights how far they've come. Our main character Jordyn, is a teenage girl who wants to make something of her last year in high school, to make lifelong memories before she's fully grown up, and in that desperation she loses sight of what is most important, her best friend Amelia. Although we embraced a lot of the coming-of-age genre conventions, we really wanted to avoid showing Jordyn in a negative light throughout her journey. We wanted to step away from the stereotypical portrayal of teenagers in media and not create characters that real teenagers couldn't relate to. I can't speak for all teenagers when I say this, but nothing is less engaging than seeing media constantly show us as moody, disinterested, and using outdated slang. We wanted to keep our dialogue as realistic as possible, and wanted our audience to be able to see themselves in Jordyn and sympathize with her through all the mistakes she makes. Jordyn is flawed, she's stubborn and impulsive and the plot is driven by her constant misdirection. But she is also compassionate and adventurous, she's a well rounded character which allows teenagers to see themselves in her."

Editing Effects

Since our groupmate Elke was doing most of the editing process, when we met up yesterday we tried to figure everything out so that the process would be a lot easier for her. We spent a lot of our meeting yesterday looking for fonts that would fit the tone and aesthetic we were going for. Since it's a coming of age film with a more adventurous protagonist, we wanted the fonts used for the Title and credits to reflect that. After looking through the Adobe Fonts website, we found a couple that we felt would suit our film opening and the title, "18 Before 18".

Font we selected

With our fonts and sound selected and our clips edited, all that was left to do was for Elke to put it all together. She has been sending us updates and so far we all really like how the film is coming together. I would've liked for all of us to keep meeting up together to continue editing it, but with our schedules and the deadline coming up we figured it'd be easier if one person did it, so Elke volunteered to edit the film opening for us. Other than that, I really want to add some sort of edit to make the lighting a bit warmer since it feels too harsh and sterile in the school shots for the mood we want to create. Ideally, lighting would be completely in our control, but because we were filming at our school the best we can do is fix it in post production, since we cant change school lighting.

Sound Editing Process

After countless delays we finally began editing our film opening. With only a couple of shots left to film of the school, our project has finally made it to post production. The first part of the process was to get all the clips and sort through all the takes. Since we filmed on my phone because I have the best quality, I was in charge of going through all the clips and finding the best takes before uploading them to one drive so my group partner Elke could begin to edit on Adobe Premiere.

After we had selected all of our clips, Elke arranged them in order of the storyboard and trimmed them so we could match the different cuts. With that done, we decided to meet up earlier today so that we could begin editing together. We spent most of our time looking for sound effects and sounds we could use for the film opening like the sound of the school bell or the background music because we ended up not getting clearance for the Inhaler song, "It Won't Always Be Like This". Since we couldn't use that song, we had to find another royalty free song that had the same tone we were originally going for. It was honestly a bit of a hassle to try to find another song last minute because we really wanted to make the Inhaler song work. After searching through Spotify for small artists we could possibly DM, we settled for this royalty free website and found a song we all really liked, "Right Now" by Nicolas Major.

With the song choice out of the way, we just had to look for a couple more sound effects before wrapping up the sound portion of the editing. Since most of the scenes were long, there weren't that many clips to edit together and the easy part of the process had been completed.

Wrapping Up

 Although we finished the main part of our filming last week, before we can  start editing we had to film a couple of montages to add to the opening and for the title sequence. For the opening montage, we wanted to have a way to visually represent Amelia and Jordyn's friendship using photos they've taken and creating a small montage with them.

Pictures we used

We hadn't thought the montage through and how we wanted to go about filming it, but after some discussion we found an idea we were all happy with. We decided to print out the photos of Amelia and Jordyn and have them set on a white background to resemble polaroid pictures and add them to a door to represent Jordyn's bedroom.

Our Finalized Montage:

We also wanted to film a series of short clips of the school to create another montage for the title sequence to establish the setting. For this we just went around the school and selected angles that we liked so that we could later film those during our lunches so that we would have shots with students to create a cohesive setting. Otherwise, we're set for filming and have nothing left to do but edit our film opening.

The Day Continues (and so does our filming)

 Yesterday we were successfully able to finish filming. After finishing at school, we drove to Lauren's house to use her bedroom for Jordyn and film our final scenes.

When we got there, her room was a lot more decorated than I expected and we only had to change a couple of things in order to make her bedroom look more like what we had in mind for Jordyn's room. I did feel a little bad since we didn't end up using most of the posters I had printed for her bedroom but at least we were overprepared and not under. After setting up, we got right to filming because we wanted to make sure we got the shot before the sun set at six. After we set everything up, we began filming our scene. At first we wanted to follow the storyboard and have Jordyn sitting at a desk with Amelia laying behind her, but because of the way the desk was set up and how bulky the desk chair was, I decided it'd be best to scrap that angle and have Jordyn sit on the bed next to Amelia. The shot is a bit less interesting, but it was the only way we could make the space work and have both of their faces be visible without the large chair back in the way.

Angle we started with

Angle we decided on

It was a last minute fix but we felt like it really changed the framing of the scene for the better, especially now that you can actually see Amelia. Overall I feel like today went really well and I'm so glad we finished filming because now we can move onto post production. I can already see the project coming together and I'm really excited to make and watch the final product of all our efforts.

Day One Redo

 Soo we started over...

We wanted to make sure we got filming done before next week so that we wouldn't fall more behind and decided today would be the best day to film everything. We were able to get Isabel (Amelia) back to help us reshoot some scenes, but Haley wasn't able to come back because she had something until late afterschool and we needed to be at our bedroom location before sundown so that we could have plenty of time to shoot Jordyn's bedroom scenes while we still had daylight; this meant that Hayley was out of the picture. Luckily, Mariana was feeling better and could take back her role as Jordyn. Unluckily, this meant that we would have to scrap everything we had done before and start over completely, which we were dreading.

Hallway BTS

We weren't able to get back the same actors we had filmed yesterday but some underclassmen who were also in drama but weren't rehearsing for the school play were able to and willing to help us reshoot by being background actors. Since we had already filmed everything before, setting up the shots was a lot easier and there was less experimenting since we already knew what shot types and angles we liked from our previous attempt. This made filming go by much faster, and we felt a lot more confident about our scene framing and the choices we made. This time around, I also felt a lot more comfortable directing Elke as she was the cinematographer. We had decided before filming that Mariana would play our actress, Elke would film, and I would direct, splitting the work evenly and all of us playing our part to bring all of our visions to life. We weren't aware before we started filming, but the band was practicing in the room over, which made it difficult to get shots that were quiet and it also made it more difficult to concentrate. We decided that the best thing to do would be to dub over the voices and mute the video in order to get clean lines. This definitely makes it more difficult, but I honestly think it'll make our project better.