CREATIVE CRITICAL RECEPTION-CIE PROJECT

BY :MARIA RASHID

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

The genre of my movie opening ROUTE ‘66 is mainly DRAMA. The conventions of the mentioned genre include exhibiting real life drama situations with realistic characters, setting and stories. It also portrays journey of character development. The heart of drama is conflict. The conflicts include inner/outer realistic struggles. Drama is mostly interlaced with other genres such as my movie which is a combination of Drama with action and thriller. This genre is used to provoke thoughts and emotions.

My sole inspiration for my movie opening is

I also took inspirations from shots of 127 hours

Original My shot

Original My shot

Other films under the same genre include

In ROUTE ‘66 I have made use of the conventions of Drama because my movie starts with an extreme real life situation i.e getting ready and gathering stuff as if the character is running away ( this raises a typical question from the audience as to why the character is running away). However, my movie shows some twists, as in the very beginning the audience thinks that it is a typical beginning but later the reason is shown- the character is in trouble.

My movie aims to raise concern about people in our society (mostly men) who get themselves into trouble and when they cannot get away with it, instead of finding a solution, they just run away from it.

My movie can be implemented for various issues such as crimes or people who enjoy getting into trouble without any reason.

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed

as a real media text?The main type of audience for my chosen genre is teenagers to

adults and stereotypically women who actually relate to the situations.

However, the target audience for ROUTE ‘66 are mostly males ageing from their late teenage years to late 30’s. This is because the situation I chose ( trying to run away from trouble) is really common with this age group in our society.

The reason I chose this situation is that in recent years, these type of issues have become a global problem which has not only affected the youth but also the society as a whole.

I would prefer to distribute my film online, which would include mediums such as NETFLIX, YOUTUBE, TWITTER, FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM etc.

With the growing use of internet, I believe that the best way to distribute my movie would be through the internet.

The internet has now become a great medium for the viral marketing of a movie and so, in order to make my movie viral, I would go for the mentioned channels of distribution.

For a start, I would keep a private screening of my movie for friends and family. This would be a test run so I can get reviews on my movie.

I also intend to have focus groups where general public can comment on the movie.

How did your production skills develop through out the project?

When I first chose media, I had little clue about how many things are in line to be explored throughout the process.

At start, I only knew photography and just the basics of that. I knew absolutely nothing about video-graphy and until my very first video project, I had no idea about the proper shooting plan, let alone the story board.

The learning process started with the shots at first. I never knew camera angles can be expressed as holding some meaning to them. For example a Dutch tilt is used to give a shaky effect, or extreme wide shots are used mostly as establishing shots. I also learned that extreme close ups are used to make the emotions of a character clear.

Moving on, my very first video project helped me learn a lot of necessary things that are to be carried out before presenting the final product. I never knew synopsis and story board is an extremely important part of pre shoot. When I learned about it and started making it a habit of working thoroughly on pre shoot planning, it made my execution of the plan more easy and smooth.

Next was editing. When working on textual analysis, I discovered that the editing did not only merge so many videos together into one and make it look represent able. Instead, I learned the about the messages the editing holds. For example, if there are quick cuts, it is more likely to show chaos and slow cuts are more likely to establish calm conversation.

Sound also plays an important part or else without sound, a video is incomplete. we learned about different types of sound i.e. digetic/non digetic and different representation of different types of music i.e calm or rock music.

It was now very clear to me that a video is not just a video of people moving or talking or anything but everything in a video was trying to establish or express something. Lighting played a similar part. Not only I learned about different types of lighting such as LOWKEY or HIGHKEY or BACKLIGHT but also what it tried to express. For example HIGHKEY light is used to give a sense of liveliness, where as LOWKEY lighting is used to create a dramatic or a mysterious effect.

Not only did I learn this all, but also started implementing and considering these factors in my movies. the study of mis en scene greatly helped when I was making my final movie opening as I had to keep everything perfect to give a realistic and professional touch to my video.

How did you integrate technologies (hardware, software, online) throughout this project?

• Making videos is not as easy as it looks, well that is what everyone thinks.

• I did not reach to this level very easily, but I had to face a lot of issues throughout the whole process.

• It first started with shooting, it wasn't really easy for me to have proper cut in the first time since I was new to this. Jerking was the biggest issue I had to face while shooting, even when shooting with a tripod. Tripods at first were not very easy to handle at first, but through time I was able to take hold of it ( even though I still have to re shoot a lot of times due to minor mistakes).

Next was editing, which I knew nothing of, I had hardly used a video editor until my very first project. Gradually, I learnt editing on my own through editing different videos and so on. The major problem I faced throughout this project was editing. I have used movie maker previously but this time I explored a little and downloaded Movavi and iMovie which greatly helped me with my final product. With movie maker, I was not able to make a proper introduction or add two sounds together, because that was what I needed the most. I also wanted to use the split screen effect which was again, not available in movie maker.

I also faced a lot of issues finding the perfect music for my video. It took me days searching for the perfect music for my video. At times, even though the music seemed great, it did not match the flow of the video. Another issue was copyright issue, when the music matched perfectly with the flow and the theme of the video, it could not be used due to copyright issues.

I also had a hard time with blogs as at time my video could not be uploaded due to various reasons and I had to substitute Vimeo for it.

THANKYOU