Creative Critical Reflection

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

   In terms of a social issue, our film raises awareness of family dysfunction and abuse. During our film, we try to convey the sense of fear that many victims of abuse face through our use of cinematography and sound design. We tried to challenge many traditional cinematic conventions by presenting what is going on in an unfiltered way, that makes it clear to the viewer that some sort of abuse is being experienced by our protagonist. Usually seen in psychological thriller films are high and low-angled shots, which our film showcases in a multitude of ways, as our main character (Noah) hears his father coming home, and as he goes into the closet to hide from him. In terms of social representation, we tried to showcase an LGBTQ person, since we often overlook them in discussions about domestic abuse. Not only did we show that but also, how the lack of resources for victims can require the person in question to go to an extreme length. Which we hinted at throughout the closet scene, where Noah's inner voice convinces him to kill his father. In order to show the anguish that he was experiencing as he was arguing with the voice inside his head, we used close-ups and extreme close-ups to emphasize our focus on the subject and their expressions.

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

  

  If our project were to be turned into a real media text, we would attempt to distribute it through as many platforms as possible, ranging from smartphones to computers. In order to gain advertising for it, we'd post the film on online forums that are usually used by film enthusiasts, and we'd attempt to enter it into local film festivals in order to give the project a name for itself, and gain exposure. We would also promote it within our social circle, and encourage our friends to share it with their other friends in order to gain a bigger audience.

  We believe that our film has the potential to be able to resonate with audiences that have experienced situations similar to what we depicted in our film, and that we could be able to provide them with a sense of community and support that they wouldn't be able to find elsewhere. Domestic violence as a whole is often considered a taboo subject, and individuals who have experienced it may feel isolated and ashamed. By showcasing the realities of domestic violence at home in an honest way, our potential film could have the power to begin new conversations about this, and raise awareness about this issue. 

How did your production skills develop throughout this project?  

   Throughout this project, many of the skills that I already had were finely tuned. As an artist, I am often training my eye to find mistakes and imperfections that could be, well, perfected. The creative parts of this film, such as the story and concept, were written by me. Trying to find a story that can be visually told within the time span of two minutes was no easy feat, and this project definitely helped me on my time-management skills. As a high school student, I usually don’t have to manage my time as strictly as I had to for this project, especially with the tight deadlines and perfecting of anything that could be made better. This project also helped me become more flexible and open to change, since ideas will be thrown left and right throughout the entirety of the project, and nothing will be set in stone until the last editor has put down their device and called it a day. I believe that the skills developed thanks to this project will ultimately help me in what's left of my high school career, and what will begin to be my college career.

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

Throughout the making of this film, we borrowed our friend's Canon camera to shoot some scenes in the beginning and roughed the rest of the film out with an iPhone 12 camera. The Canon camera was able to give us a very high-quality piece of video, which we used in the beginning scenes when introducing the film. Later on, as time progresses, and Noah's father gets home, we can see the video quality slowly decreasing, and the tension in the film gets thicker and thicker. Throughout this project, we also used a free editing app called CapCut. This app is popular amongst editors, and since Rocio had previous experience with it, we used it in order to clip our video takes together and add voice-overs along with the audio. It was slightly tricky to get the voice-overs to sound natural, and if we had had some extra experience with film-making and editing, then perhaps our film could've ended up even better.

Here are a couple of pictures from our time on set :>