CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION

BY:SHIZA AHMED

Here’s a picture of my actors in reality

And this is how I made them look:

The name of my movie opening is the ‘psycho-path’. The genere of the movie is a suspense thriller. The actor I’ve casted in my movie was supposed to depict childish and care-free attitude to signify and to the emphasize on the fact that if a child is not given adequate attention, love and care in the first few years of his or her life the resulting consequences can be unpleasant.

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

The name of the main character is kate who’s a beautiful 16 year old girl but as a result of some past traumatic experiences

like being bullied at school she has become an introvert and isolated herself completely

from her circle of friends and family and enjoys to spend most of her time talking to

dolls which she considers as her real friends, she also however feels lonely and

requires the love. The twisting bit of the plot was marinas abrupt transition from a shy quiet lovely girl into a bold, cruel and a

confident lady.

The boy who was tied up was named ‘jake’ weather they both knew each other from before or not and if they had an history

previously was left unclear to be anticipated by the audience. The guy was helpless and

nervous and wanted o get rid of kate as soon as he could, where as, kate has been shown

to have mixed feelings of love, anger and hate towards jake, the way she looks at jake can be an element which is open to several

interpretations, primarily that she was greatly in need of his presence and had gone to the extent of physically abusing him and locking

him down .

A few pictures of her expressions

In my video I’ve mostly maintained most of the conventions and stereotypes linked to the “psycho-path” and it’s behaviour. The coventions that were maintained are as follow :Marina was shown childish with two pony tails playing with barbie dolls

CONVENTIONS

The sound was also very typical and gave the true and accurate feel.

The expressions and the smirks are also seen in many movies of the psycho path behaviour.

The abrupt transition from one personality to another and the change in voice and tone have also been seen in countless movies .

The social issue that has been highlighted in my movie-opening is bullying and the impact of having no friends and being mistreated has on an individuals pattern of behaviour and life.

ISSUES HIGHLIGHTED

My inspiration was taken from two movies primarily which were the room mate and the psychopath..

INSPIRATION

Roommate vs psychopath

Actress laighton meester

Marina (aleesha janjua)

I improvised the camera angle but this shot was inspired by this particular scene from the movie roommate

Close-up from room mate

Wide shot from the psychopath

When I started this project I was not sure If I’ll be able to make it through the end or not. My production skills after this project have not only developed but have also given me great

confidence in terms of camera angles and polished my weak areas. I have always struggled with the editing part but after editing the rough draft countless times before the actual so I mastered the art .

How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

Before I had media as a subject I’d watch movies just for the heck of it but now it seems like I have new eyes and now I not only evaluate the movie with regard to how it’s shot but also the constant commenting on various scenes is inevitable now. While I was writing the script for my movie-opening I watched several movies with similar plots, for example, the roommate and the 7 psychopaths etc .

I always thought producing movies was a very simple task and all that was

required was a camera man and actors, making a video of mine taught me that how complex and lengthy this process

and how many people are required it also taught me what things must be done to

get in order to make a movie. It also taught me the virtue of being patient and

not giving up as I edited my video 6 times before the final submission to get it

perfect.

My horizons of creativity have been expanded greatly by watching so many

different movies and getting an inspiration from them I’ve always had a tough time to stick to one idea, even for

the movie-opening I initially had a different story line after I shot it I realized that it’s not turning the way I’d like it to and then came up with another script

overnight .

Making this video has been a constant struggle from deciding the storyline, persuading the actors, the costumes, the perfect set, the editing everything

has been challenging but yet the experience made me discover many new things about myself which I did not know existed it boosted my level

of It’s been a tough but an overwhelming journey for me and has

boosted my confidence level greatly.

Another thing that I have learnt is to meet the deadlines and work on time. Though sometimes, the editing took longer than what one would anticipate and we’d go running to our begging and pleading to give us more time but nonetheless it made us more responsible and the true importance of the essence of time and that not doing things on time is useless.

As we all know, the distribution of the movie is the most important and integral part. I can not emphasize enough on the fact that a good strategy of distribution can completely change a movies fate. However, my movie-opening would mainly target the young adult from the age of 14 onwards, the reason I say this is because the

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

The Story line is a little difficult to be understood and if watched by younger

children then they might get so fascinated by it and start copying it which can be both harmful as well as dangerous for them. To understand why a persons

behaving the way the are, requires an individuals empathetic understanding and the ability to put himself in the shoes of

other which wont be possible of its watched by children under the age of 14 .

Since the budget of my movie is not very high I won’t be able to hire any of the big six to distribute my movie in the market, I also feel they are looking for more professional work and would not acknowledge begginers work. My video has been made by the resources that were available and no external help has been taken from anywhere which is why I’d say it’s prone to improvement and can

be ۔rectified in the future

After everything has been done and finalized I would want any of the

independent studios to disrtibute it and I have complete confidence that the will not reject it because the unique selling point of my movie opening is that not

many successful hits have been made on the ‘psycho path” behaviour and people are keen and always looking forward to

watch something that is different and out of the box.

If by any chance my movie is rejected then I’d launch it on the social networking sites, for example,

dailymotion, youtube, vimeo and facebook. The publicity can be done through keeping various contests on instagram and twitter and the winner would win a t-shirt with the movie’s

name on it.

I would prefer my work to be distributed by the lions gate entertainment for the reason

that they have relaeased a few movies in the past which have a similar plot and have done

well in the market. It’s very much possible that this script would intrigue them a lot.

Integrating technologies usually refers to combining different technologies and using them for a certain task.I’ve integrated several technologies in my project firstly I’ve become an avid Imdb checker also the amount of research work that’s involved in every stage is very crazy so I’ve gotten used to browsing for several hours online on my laptop, Internet has made life easy because the amount of help you receive form there is huge and then there are always different tutorials present which you can refer to in there’s a chance of error.

How did you integrate technologies in this project?

I learnt how to use several different softwares. For editing, I mostly worked

on the videopad and adobe after effects. Learning how to work properly on them was a very difficult task for me because I constantly struggled

throughout but what helped the most were the the tutorials present on

youtube. For research on any particular movie, I seeked wikipedias

or imdbs help.

Other than that, I made a blog on word press which was again something I had never done in my life before and it took me a day or so to figure out how to go about it. We also uploaded our vidoes on vimeo for projects which was also new. This journey has taught us many things which I wouldn’t have been able to learn otherwise. Because of this I frequently checked my Gmail account which wasn’t active at all before, e-mailing took over the texting and whatsapping trend for me throughout .

Another soft wares was the power point and slideshare which I used almost after ages in order to make this presentation. My ideas have been polished and refined tremendously. I used a nikon 560 D to shoot my video, it’s very easy and user-friendly. To avoid jerks I also used a tripod which was very helpful.

A few fun pictures from the shootKeeping up with the actors tantrums

by feeding them coffee and food.

HARD AT WORKKKK

THANK YOU SO MUCH!