Critical Self Reflection (Film Opening)

The brief set by cambridge was:

buntu, sans-serif; font-size: x-large; font-style: italic;">Main task: the titles and opening of a new fiction film (to last a maximum of two minutes). Titles should follow the institutional conventions of commercial cinema. The task may be undertaken individually or as a group. There should be a maximum of four members to a group.

This blogpost is a critical self reflection (me) 

https://prezi.com/view/wAl6EsInzyjBNb58QH6A/

My group and I decided to create a film opening for a movie called "The Guy Upstairs". This movie opening is in the thriller genre, the main idea is of a a female student who lives a middle class life and starts to get suspicious with her neighbour upstairs.

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

My movie that me and my group created has a genre of Thriller and Crime. This particular genre with started with showing a female students normal life while continuing  university. She is wearing a normal shirt that an average student would wear to study with this the audience will know that the students is in a middle class. The first scene shows that she is studying at night. In this scene there are is music at all only pure background sound with silent which connote a mystery feeling for the audience and creates a hermeneutic code which makes the audience think what is going to be shown in this movie and make them guess what genre is this movie. Beside emptying the sound we also edited the scene to have a blue tone that makes the movie seems cold which connotes melancholy, tension, and suspense. From the beginning of the scene we added a clock ticking sound which is a non diegetic sound  to create suspense to the audience, we matched the editing cut scene based on the clock beat, when the beat changes for 2 tick the next scene will appear with a cut scene with different camera angle, with this we wanted to make the audience expect something every 2 beats of the clock and build the audience curiosity and suspense. When the main character which is Alice looked up to the roof the clock ticking sound stop to make the scene more suspense with no sound at all, as this is happening the audience will expect to see something scary when the camera movement finishes due to the suspense that are already built. The main character is alone in the room which make a connotation loneliness We place our lighting above the subject to make a strong shade to make the audience feel doubt or gloom. The font that me and my team agreed to use is a slasher film font. In the beginning we use a long shot to show the audience the mise-en-scene of the movie, by using this long shot allows the audience to classify her class by seeing her belongings and which are only normal objects with normal brand and not expensive and luxury belongings, before we change the scene of the movie we add a slight zoom in into the movie to make the audience feel like their are brought inside the movie.

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

The media product that me and my team made is a movie opening, this movie opening can be watch in the cinemas and will be released in October 2024 together with halloween to match the feel of the environment and surrounding of the audience. This movie opening that me and my team created contains hermeneutic code,  a scene that contains one is when the the main character hear something from upstairs and a strange sound that creates like an object fell or a foot stomp with this the audience interest are built and make them think what sound is that and where is it from. Having a hermeneutic code inside a movie opening that has a genre of thriller makes the movie more interesting and creates a sense of mystery to the audience to make them more curious of the what is coming ahead and expecting the unexpected. The film opening has a binary opposite of downstairs vs upstairs this is because both of the character are both on different story levels, with this binary opposite of downstairs vs upstairs will give the audience a general idea or a big idea of what is this movie is going to contain, the phrase downstairs vs upstairs connotes a story that has to different sides of each of the story level for example in our movie we put the first floor as our main character which has a normal and chill daily life and has a positive vibes on her with a nice and positive surroundings, while the second floor which also means the title of our movie has a completely opposite personality and vibes, the second floor scene has a dark background which connotes a mystery,  evilness or a psychopath aura. The tool that we used are bunnies which connotes a lot of meaning with horror and scary vibes rabbits are usually cute and adorable but if we use it in a horror or evil vibe makes it unexpected which makes even scarier and makes the audience shock to see it.

3.How did your production skill develop through out this project

Production skills are very important in making a project especially a film opening project. Through out this project i've learn many production skill that can develop in the future in making other projects. One of the examples are i learned how to used a editing software called Premier Pro with this software the movie opening scene was edited using this software, to be specific this software is used to edit all the scene in the movie including adding the credits and the voice over at the specific part of the movie.  An example from the scene is at the beginning the scene was edited to be zoomed into the scene to make the audience felt that they are brought into the movie.Beside software there are also hardware that I learn one of the examples are learning how to use a camera to record a scene that can make an audience feel the movie or going inside the movie and make the camera angle to make it suspense for the audience, beside that i also learn to make camera movements to make it easier to make transition, an example from the movie we can use is when Sera is writing and the camera is focusing on her hand and the book than the camera is moving into an object to make a black screen which can be very helpful to make a transition to start another scene with still making a connection with the previous scene.

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

Technologies has really helped me and my team a lot to complete this project. For the research and planning i use google and Webtoon to research story and plot line ideas for the film opening me and my team made, we decided to choose a thriller genre to continue through out this project. For the production part I used the camera from Sony which is Sony A73 this camera is used to record every scene. The  lighting that I used is from GVM and this lighting is used in every shot from the beginning until the end of the movie opening. For the post production I used Premier Pro to edit all the scene that was taken for example to input the credit scene of the extract  and editing the brightness and tone of the scene to make the audience able to differentiate weather the scene is a suspense or still in a normal phase. We also used a Saramonic Blink 500 Pro B2 where it is a wireless microphone where the devices are divided into two the receivers and transmitter where the receivers are going to be connected into the camera and the actor is going to used a transmitter. Because of the microphone we managed to produces a deep reverb audio quality since it only captures audio within the range in which we are focusing on playing with audio. For the device i use to do all the work is a 2018 Macbook Pro. We used Whatsapp to communicate with each other and Google docs to create the script and big idea of the movie opening and last but not least we used Google Drive to insert all the scenes that are taken. The media can be presented in Google Drive or Youtube. Overall the technologies really help us to create this project smoothly.