CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION: INCARNATE

 

Q1) How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

A1)Our film is a work of fiction, and doesn't essentially Target a social issue, but when it comes to depiction our film illustrates our idea on a very symbolic level.

When I say symbolism, I mean how our film has provided slight hints to the viewers about the doppleganger itself,and is an abstract idea without a concrete explanation, which leaves it open to free thought and the viewer's creativity.

When speaking about dopplegangers, it can mean a lot of things, such as split personality disorder symbolism where the charecter is same, but goes through a change in personality, as well as a fictional storyline where the doppleganger and protagonist are two different characters.

Really it depends on what the viewer interprets when watching the film, and in my opinion that is the beauty of it, leaving the film at a cliffhanger keeps the idea open and possibilities endless.

Q2) How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

When talking about audience, i belive our Target audience to be both teenagers and grown-ups, as a lot of the intertextual references subtly hinted in the film are gen z references and would likely be better understood by the younger audience.

However, on the contrary the deeper meaning of the  film is something that would be better understood by grown ups, as with the short attention span of the young generation, they are not ones to analyse a film shot by shot just to understand the underlying depiction unlike the modernism era based individuals, who are more intrigued by the deeper underlying meaning of a media text rather that the overcoating visuals.

At the same time focussing on visuals in order to be able to exploit our potential audiences to the highest extent is just as essential as it is to symbolise a deeper meaning. As of today, with the short attention spans of audiences people only stop to look at and understand what they find visually appealing at the first glance.

Hence in order to be able to satisfy the requirements of all types of viewers, our goal was to make our film both simple to understand with a directly implied meaning, aswell as an encrypted yet openly visible symbolism based.

On the other hand, when talking about distribution, it is first important to understand what's meant by the term distribution:

By definition, distribution methods are ways media productions advertise and promote their media text to their audiences by using various platforms.

In order to be able to distribute our film efficiently, we created a social media page, however we stopped using the page to advertise after our second film was scratched, as we were on a time constraint.

This would mean that, in social terms the only way to promote our film would be our blogs, reaching all types of media viewers, as well as encouraging our friends and classmates to watch our film in person.

Q3) How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

Our production skills as a group definitely increased, if I had to say one thing in particular, we definitely learned how to manage budgets and recover from ideas that we didn't like and ended up scratching.

Moreover, we also learned coordination and teamwork, balance and distribution of roles from our projects.

If I had to speak for myself, me personally I believe my direction skills got better without a doubt, visualising a script and being able to bring through an idea, and explaining it to the cinematographer and the actress was mostly what I got better at.

But the one thing that I didn't get better at, but learnt completely was conceptualization of my creative thinking process and being able to give it shape during the production process.

Moreover, I also learnt editting skills and scrip formatting, even though I didn't do those jobs for this film, but I still learnt from those around me and developed my own skills in order to be more independent when it comes to media skills.

I also learnt more about cameras and cinematography, lightning management as well as smaller skills like makeup and sound.

Q4) How did you integrate technologies- software, hardware and online- in this project?

A4) In this era of new technology, there are a lot of options available for people, a lot of tools that can help integrate technology both hardware and especially software in their media texts.

For reference, in my film we used an iPhone 14 to film, it has a cinematic mode which is ideal for filming as the microphone is pretty good aswell.

Majority of the technology used was online blogs to distribute the film and editing softwares to edit the film. The editing software used was Adobe premiere pro.

Adobe premiere pro is ideal for video editting as it has colour grading, colour grade presets and even a lot of cutting pasting and transition options.

Moreover Adobe premiere pro has a wide array of sound effects and music available, which is more than enough to create a good short film.

Lastly I also used PicsArt to edit my movie poster and used blogger to make my blogs.