Creative Critical Reflection - All Bets Are Off

CCR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJBGmgEn_5w 

Our Final Project!

Below is our final project! I cannot wait for you guys to watch our short film! Don't forget to check out our website and postcard as well. Like I've said its been a fun journey and I cannot believe we are done. My group and I definitely came across many obstacles, but I think we were able to overcome them and create a successful project overall. Enjoy!   

Short Film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXM_p6UmiF0

Website

https://isapatino1d.wixsite.com/allbetsareoff 

Postcard

https://www.canva.com/design/DACz6uF7QNY/y86r8mm2BzfLO-B7F6Fktg/edit

Time To Reflect...

We are at the finish line. I wanted to take this moment and reflect on our journey and what we were able to accomplish. When my group and I started, we thought creating a schedule would keep us on track and help us complete the project with no obstacles. Yet, we quickly found out that that wasn’t going to be the case. We had scheduled to pick an idea by the first week and start filming by the third. However, we were not able to establish an idea until the middle of our third week. Thus, causing our group to be behind schedule. At this point we felt defeated and overwhelmed. Nevertheless, after a few days of thinking, we were able to come up with another idea that still contained our original storyline but was now more simple and creative. After we agreed on the idea, it was go time. The next week, we were able to reedit our script to fit our new story and create a storyboard for our scenes. We even went through two practices that helped us fix any issues with light, sound, and camera movement. The following week we were able to shoot everything and begin editing. This gave us some relief as our group was back on track. Currently, we are now on our final week. We were able to advance on our postcard and finalize our website. We added various details onto our website that we believe will help our marketing strategy for our brand and short film. For example, we created and added four social media platforms to the home page of our site that, we believe, will benefit our marketing campaign significantly: 

• On Twitter, we created an account that will promote our short film to our target audience, which is women in their late teens and early twenties. After having done some research, we decided that Twitter was going to be a good marketing platform as 36% of the users are between the ages of 18 to 29. Our followers will also have the opportunity to turn on their “notifications” when we have new ads or information regarding our project. 

• With Facebook, we created an account in which will help promote and advertise our short film as well. By using this social media platform, we are able to attract different groups of people that are within our target audience age range. Facebook is known to have around 1.09 B active users on a daily basis. Of those individuals, 82 percent are between the ages of 18 to 29. Thus, it will benefit us greatly to promote our content here. We will also do live chats with our actors and include VIP access to more upcoming projects.  
• Our short film and future projects will be uploaded and available on our YouTube account. Here, our target audience can subscribe to our channel and have free access to some of our films. We believe that YouTube allows us to offer more exclusive footage to our audiences. For example, on our channel, individuals can watch interviews of our actors and have a behind-the-scenes look at our short film, “All Bets Are Off.” 
• Finally, on Instagram, we will be posting special announcements, what film festivals our short film will be played at, and access to learn more about our actors. We choose this platform as it is considered the second most popular social media site with over 500 million users of which 38% are women.

Thus, implementing these popular social media platforms to our marketing campaign will aid us in advertising our short film and, hopefully, attract these audiences to subscribe and follow our pages in order for them to support us in the future.

All in all, I am so happy to see that our project turned out better than we expected. We definitely had a bumpy start, but after agreeing on an idea, we were able to create amazing content for each of the components. I want to thank my group mates for all the hard work they put in the project. We all helped out and supported one another thought out this journey. I also want to give a special thanks to our actors, Juan Munevar and Alejandra Morao, who played our main leads, and my brother who helped us out on filming day and taught me a few things about editing.

My last two blog posts will de dedicated to finally showing you guys our AICE A Media Level Portfolio Project short film, website, and postcard. I will also be posting a 10 minute CCR video that will explain my project and the marketing campaign in full, so be sure to keep checking in.

It has been a fun journey and I won’t forget it. Until next time!

Getting Ahead...

As you all know, this is our final week! It will be be dedicated to fixing any issues with each component, posting three more blogs, and completing a CCR. My group and I are still in the process of finishing the short film as we need to add our title and credits along with the music. For our website, we still need to add most of our photos to the gallery and include all our social media links. Lastly, for our postcard, we just need to add our information and we will be set to go. So, as we are completing these few final details, I thought I would get ahead and start creating an outline for my CCR. Like Mrs. Stoklosa said, our creative critical reflection is just as important as each component within our project, so I want to make sure I spend this week developing my ideas for it. To start off, I reviewed each question we are suppose to answer and made sure I was able to understand each one. The only question that I had trouble understanding was the one regarding branding. Thus, I decided to quickly research what “branding” means again and how I incorporated it in our project. According to an article known as “What Is Branding,” branding is defined as the “process of giving a meaning to specific company, products or services by creating and shaping a brand in consumers’ minds” (“What Is Branding”). The article gave good examples of how it is used in today’s society. For instance, the author explained how specific water bottles, like Fiji, create a sense of “branding” through their packaging, like in the image below:

                                

The companies also create a sense of “branding” through their advertising. Below is a video ad that the company, Fiji, frequently creates in order to remind their consumers who they are and what they offer:

Overall, this article was very helpful in making me realize that my group and I may need to add a few more elements in order for our project to better show our sense of “branding.” Another question I wanted to review was the one asking how our products would engage our audience and how they would be distributed. After looking it over a few times, I think the first part of the question wants us to explain how our short film, website, and postcard will attract our target audience. While, the second question wants to know where our film as well as our postcard and website will be available. Thus, for our postcard, we will most likely be handing those out on the day of the film festivals along with a digital copy on our website. Our short film will be distributed to three film festivals, such as the Miami Film Festival, and will also be available to purchase directly from our site. Overall, our target audience will be able to locate us and follow our projects through our social media and main website.

By getting ahead on my script for the CCR, I can ask all the necessary questions to my teacher beforehand and will be able to have most of my ideas together by the end of the week. This will also allow me to come up with a creative way to film my CCR. I was thinking of doing it like a vlog in where I would be in different locations explaining my project and answering all the four main questions. Thus, I will be creating an outline today in order to start answering the questions this week and completing all of them by, the latest, Thursday.

Wish me luck!

Citations:

Marion. “What Is Branding?” The Branding Journal, 12 Feb. 2018,

www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/10/what-is-branding-definition/.

FIJIWaterCompany. “FIJI Water TV Commercial: Deep Below.” YouTube, YouTube, 15 Feb. 2015,  

www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLguYiRglZ7_pbRnGePnvOlRwYCBLSzqbn&v=ERbT5zqYEhk.

Closer than we think...

Yesterday, my class and I had the opportunity, once again, to get together in small groups to discuss our projects. Each person presented a quick preview to what they have completed and asked around for help and suggestions to make it better. For example, our classmate, Isa, wanted us to help her with one of her trailers. After watching it, we were able to give her good feedback about fixing a few details, like making some scenes shorter and working on tighter editing. Overall, our group was really helpful. I was able to present our short film’s website and our idea for the postcard. My classmates mentioned that the images on the site were visually appealing and really makes the audiences curious to what the short film would be about. Furthermore, I also took this chance to ask for their help regarding our title. My group and I are stuck between two titles, either “All Bets Are Off” or “Point of Fools.” Me and Isa really like the second title as it describes a time in where certain individuals where mislead. However, our third group member, Paloma, does not agree with it. I asked my classmates and they really enjoyed both titles, yet it seemed they liked “All Bets Are Off” more. Nevertheless, we will have to make a solid decision by Monday.

I also want to take this moment and talk about our progress regarding our short film. Like I mentioned before, we have been editing this entire past week and it’s been coming along just like we hoped. We still need to add one more scene and edit some minor shots, and then we can move on to sound and adding the yellow color filter to the whole film. Some troubles we have been noticing, however, were that our actors, including me, did not go along with the script and moved around in different ways that affects the continuity of certain scenes. Nevertheless, to fix this, we have been tightening the editing and implementing different shots to make it more interesting as well. For our sound, we still need to add the music and re-record a few lines to make the scenes flow smoother. I have been looking at some music that I would like to include within our dinner scene and at the end with the credits. After recently watching a scene from Whiplash in where the main character goes out on a date, I thought our film could also add some smooth jazz in the background like how Whiplash incorporated in the date scene. It definitely makes it more interesting, but does not take the audiences away from what the characters are talking about. I thought we can then included this at the end of our short film along with the credits as well.

Here’s a song that I really liked and would love to include in our short film. It’s royalty and copyright free, so we can definitely use it:

Overall, I was happy that our classmates and I were able to get together one last time to fix and adjust a few more details before our final due date. My group and I are definitely back on track and feel really good about the components we have created. Like always I'll keep you guys updated with any more exciting news. See you next time!

Citations:

Bugden, Ross. “♩♫ Upbeat Jazz Music ♪♬ - New York, 1924 (Copyright and Royalty Free).” 

YouTube, YouTube, 31 Mar. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnPLbKmYCKQ.

Update: Postcard & Website

Yesterday my group and I met and had the opportunity to work more on our website and postcard for our final project. We want to make sure we are spending equal amount of time on each component so our overall project can turn out successful. My group and I decided to divide the sections in which each of us will be in charge of completing. For example, Isa will be writing the majority of the information for the website. I will be focusing on finishing editing our short film and adding all the images to the website's gallery. While Paloma will be editing the postcard and adding all the needed information. This will allow us to work diligently on each section while staying on schedule. Although we will be working on different areas of the project, we will be helping one another throughout the process.

Furthermore, I want to quickly explain what we decided to do, specifically, regarding our website and postcard components.

For our website, we will be including an “about” page that explains the synopsis of our film, along with the description of who are actors are and their background stories. The site will also have a behind the scenes video and a gallery for our audiences viewing. The information available on the website is meant to offer audiences a closer look at our cast and crew, posters, and links where they can purchase our film. It will also give them an opportunity to follow us on social media to be updated on any upcoming projects we hope they would support in the future.

Here’s a sneak peek to our website’s homepage:

I thought we could also add a countdown page in where our audiences can keep track of when our short film will be available, whether through a film festival or on a digital media store, like iTunes. Nevertheless, we still have to edit and add a few more things, such as font sizes, colors, and vital information in order for our website to be complete.

Next, for our postcard, we decided to use stills from our short film to be our background images. We thought this was a great idea to show a sneak peak of the most important scenes. These images could be considered a teaser to our short film allowing audiences to be curious and want to view it at the film festivals.

Below are a few examples we want to imitate for our postcard:

https://goo.gl/images/ZqY253

https://goo.gl/images/joiMYq

My group and I really liked a still shot from our short film of our couple looking at the psychiatrist. We thought we could use this for the front of our postcard. The title will be placed on the top left along with the names of the film festivals on the right-hand side. With this, our postcard will show the general idea of our film and keeps the information clean and simple. We may need to add a few more details, but, overall that would be the layout. For the back, we have not yet decided on the image as we are stuck between two. However, we know that our information will include our website, social media sites, and the location of where our short film will be playing.

All in all, we are closer than we thought we would be. Like I mentioned before, we still have a lot of work to do, but I believe we are moving along really nicely. I think my group and I will be meeting this weekend to continue editing and finishing each component so we can leave all of next week to perfecting a few minor details and starting our script for our CCR.

We are almost there. Until next time!

Onto Editing…

We are done filming! Yesterday was such a successful day. We were able to shoot everything we planned along with a few extra scenes that we could add later in editing. Our first scene took a little longer than anticipated because our actors were practicing their lines and we also needed to move around a few equipment, but regardless I think we had such an amazing time hanging out and filming this short film. Something I was really happy about was that we didn’t have any trouble with lighting. That was definitely a fear I had, but because we practiced a few days before, we did not encounter any lighting issues!

Now that we are done filming, it’s onto editing. My group and I have planned to get our short film, website, and postcard edited and ready for next weekend in order to fix anything we may not like for our final project. For our short film, my group and I will be using premiere to edit. I’ve only ever used iMovie for editing, but because my family just bought a subscription to Adobe Premiere, I thought I’d give it a try. I decided to view a quick 16 minute tutorial video that showed me the basic tools to using this editing software.

The editing process is very similar to iMovie, however, accessing the tools and playing around with the effects are a little different. The YouTube video, “Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 - Basic Editing Introduction Tutorial,” basically explained how to cut certain clips, play around with audio, and add text to the video.

Yesterday night, after a long day of filming, I was really excited to start editing our first scene and see how it would work all together. Below is a screenshot of my late night editing process:

Ultimately, I was able to finish the first scene with the help of my brother, an Adobe Premiere pro, and it honestly came out amazing! I am so ready to continue editing our other scenes this week and soon seeing our final product.

See you next time!

Citations:

TechMindBlow. “Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 - Basic Editing Introduction Tutorial.” YouTube, YouTube,12 Sept. 

2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWTHWOY1usU.