CCR: The Script

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

My product challenges conventions due to the genre alone. Psychological thrillers 

(which is the genre of my product) challenges the conventional narrative due to it subverting the audiences expectations. It contains misdirections and plots twists which create a sense of uncertainty and ambiguity. 

While most genres are clear with traditional conventions such as humor, to make you laugh. And Horror to make you scared, my product explores complex psychological themes conveyed through trauma and memory loss.

To break it down:

Our film is overall about a young hispanic girl who was kidnapped at a young age, and put into an 80's sitcom production without any remembrance of her previous life. 

80s sitcoms usually consist of a generic white family whereas in our film we included a very diverse cast having white parents, with black and hispanic children which insinuates they are adopted. 

Having a diverse cast represents a range of social groups from different backgrounds and reflects the diversity of the real world. 

This is done by breaking stereotypes, representing different perspectives and overall increasing representation of different ethnic groups

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

My product engages with audiences throughout its entirety. Although my target audience was teenagers, its unique genre gives it the ability to be multigenerational. Our cast consists of young adults which attracts the young crowd. But due to the fact that it is originally supposed to represent the 1980's, the older generation will tend to like it as well.  

Our film introduces the audience with equilibrium, showing the diegetic title transitioning to the sitcom house. Then throughout the intro it goes through the short sitcom portion, to disequilibrium. In this process the main character breaks the fourth wall further engaging the audience to feel sympathetic towards the main character who is soon going to meet their demise.

When it comes to distribution, our plan was to upload it to Youtube as a short film.

3. How did your production skills develop throughout this project? 

My production skills developed heavily over this project due to me establishing a multitude of editing techniques by having hours of time to practice and try new things. An example of this would be the green screen on the monitor. This abnormal edit was something I wouldn't see myself doing but, stepping out of my comfort zone I was able to add it to my list of abilities.

I also built a lot of team reliance during production as well. Normally I'm a more independent worker and I like being in control of the operations but in this production I played a more passive role as an editor allowing me to depend on my director and cinematographer for good shots.

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

In this production I integrated technologies by not only the software but the hardware and use of social media as a research platform.

Starting with software, Final Cut Pro took me through long nights of editing without crashing nor deleting footage during the session. It helped us upload a high quality introduction with fast frame rates in a reasonable time constraint.

Hardware wise, I used a a canon m50 with a 64 GB SD card to record and store footage temporarily. After the recording sessions I would upload the footage to my SanDisk with a 1 TB so the files wouldn't get lost or corrupted.

Finally when it comes to how I used my online resources, I started off by using google to learn about different films that had similar genres to mine so I can better grasp the concept. From Google I used Youtube to watch different editing techniques and download non diegetic content like the laugh and glitch effects. Lastly we used TikTok to find the main orchestra in our film to create musical presence in it.