media studies portfolio-creative critical reflection

CREATIVE CRITIC

AL

REFLECTIO

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By: Mahnoor

Avais

HOW DOES YOUR PRODUCT USE OR CHALLENGE THE CONVENTIONS?

The genre of my short film is, Romantic love story, which revolves around the story of two individuals who parted ways after living happily together. I have challenged the conventions as in usual short films there are dialogues between the people but in my movie there are no dialogues rather a narration done by one of the actors of my film. The guy is recalling and narrating all the amazing times he has spend with his partner while typing it as a letter to Her while adoring all the beautiful moments he had with her and how due to a few misunderstandings and lack of compatibility they had to part ways.

The movie I’ve taken inspiration from is The Fault In Our stars for poster/postcard, and I’ve tried keeping some parts similar.

My Inspirational movies are the Nicholas Sparks romantic movies.

I’ve also challenged the conventions as I’m not aware of any real time movies that might have followed the same story line as mine in their opening scene because my opening scene is usually the last scene shown in the movies.

Opening scene from my short film, One Last Time.

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of branding?

This is the picture which I’ve used on my postcard, webpage and blog which connects the three of them and creates a sense of branding.

Apart from this I’ve used different colour themes for my postcard, webpage and portfolio but the only colour common is the shade of blue. The reason behind this is, that the viewers would think of different things coming up which would increase their curiosity but in the end they would find out it was all for the same short film.

How does your product engage the audiences and would it be distributed as a real media text?My short film targets the mass media audience as it’s a love story so people aged between 15-40 would like to watch this film. If I were to choose a distribution company to help advertise my product in future, I would choose Lions Gate studios. It’s not part of the big six but still has 7% of the market share in the USA film market. Which makes it an affordable and easily accessible Mini-major company that will be able to distribute my film at an affordable cost with reasonable amount of profit.

The distribution of my movie would be done by the distribution company as well as on social media sites so that the movie already goes viral before it’s release and people know more about it.The teasers along with the trailers would be released on the social sites before they’re shown in cinemas.

How did your production skills developed throughout this project?

Throughout the year I’ve gained a lot. I’ve learnt new terms which I’d never even heard of.How to edit videos on movie maker and shoot the video in different angles were the majors.

Our sir told us about different camera angles we never knew about like wide shot, point of view shot, dolly shot and more.

Wide shot from the short film.

Exploring websites was always fun until we had to create our own this year for the portfolio. We were told about a site wix.com by our sir, where we can make free webpages on our own. It was difficult at first, but with practice we completed the task on time.I’m using Tumblr since three years but since last year there was a new meaning behind using it. I never thought of using it by creating and uploading my own videos but always reposting other’s videos and pictures. We upload our videos here as it’s easy and fast. We can submit our presentations here rather than creating them in hand written folders and submitting with the fear of them being misplaced or any other sort of damaged caused.Our Sir gave us enough confidence that I started making short vines and upload them.

Using camera and editing videos was never difficult as we have always been doing it since our O’Levels. Making postcards and Posters was a new experience which we learned with practice. We created our own postcards and posters on Microsoft Powerpoint and online photo editors.

With time I improved with my editing skills as before I was not aware with the fast and slow cuts and my editing points were very weak but now I can do quite well by making videos on windows movie maker.

How did you integrate technologies in this project?

I used canon 700D to shoot my video and windows live movie maker to edit it.For posting the video online I used www.tumblr.com to make my video available to people online.For making the webpage I used www.wix.comFor uploading my portfolio I used www.slideshare.net