A Critical Reflection On A Year Of Movie Making

In the film Wrongodings, the main characters are 2 delinquent teenagers who have to learn their lessons the hard way. It shows the social issue that revolves around teenagers always causing issues and being mischievous. They get bored of hanging out at each other’s houses and to pass the time prank a random neighbor. This leads to them learning their lesson through a curse caused by the homeowner. The only way they can revert this is to clean up their mess and swear never to do it again. The story and product all tell a story of delinquents in society. The only difference is that in our products and film, we have them learn their lesson and become better through these experiences. Besides the film, our website and postcard also help represent these issues. The postcard gives a quick peek at the movie and is still able to convey this idea. The front shows a house, much like the one we prank in the movie. The picture of the teenagers playing shows that the characters are delinquents and are clearly the stereotypical teenager. The website also helps show this. It again has the same photo of the messed up house. Constantly showing this house right away brings the idea of a destroyed house, likely the outcome after these teenagers get to it. Overall, the products we created and the choices we made in the process were all very purposeful. The goal was to show rowdy and misbehaving teenagers naturally and how they reach these choices and decisions.

We worked really hard as a group to make sure all of our products worked together. We really wanted to create a sense of branding and I think we achieved that through the synergy and collaboration of our products. A clear example of this is the link chain we incorporated into every single product we created in order to link back to our short film and its release. If you went to one of our social media accounts, it would always link back to our short film. Our social media accounts are also always linked to each other. To see this you can visit our Instagram page, and in the biography section you will not only see a release date for our movie, but you will also find links to where to watch the film. Other links you will find in our social media biographies is links to the rest of our social media accounts. Again, if you started with the Instagram page, you could find the links to our Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and everything else. Another way we wanted to create a single brand image was through the postcard we created. Our postcard was a physical method to help spread the word about our brand. We printed them out and spread them around our school and local communities in order to help spread the word about our film and our brand. On the postcard, we included our handles so anyone who was interested in the postcard images and messages could find our online accounts and learn more about the short film and the brand it is associated with. We hoped that when everything links and loops back to each other it would create a strong sense of a single brand united over one product.

There are many ways we chose to use our products in order to engage with the audience. Every single piece of our brand was made in an effort to keep our audience interacting with and entertained by our short film and its process. We made many posts on each social media account in order to engage with the audience. We posted snapshots of scenes from our film so that the audience is always excited to see the film. They see clips or shots and want to know where they are from and how they could see the whole film. With the use of our social media, I believe our group successfully kept an interested audience who was excited about the release of our short film Wrongdoings. Yet another way we wanted to engage the audience was through the physical release of our postcard. The postcard helped bring lots of attention to our short film and get our audience entertained until the official release of the film. It also greatly helped bring excitement over the release of our film. Without these tools, I do not think our film would have gotten an audience at all, nor kept them entertained and engaged in our film and our filmmaking process.

Through our research for our movie, we learned of many common conventions. This new information we learned helped inform us on what we needed to do when making our film in order to both use and challenge the common conventions. We mainly looked at the conventions of the genre we used in our film. We wanted our movie to be considered a mystery movie so we had to do lots of research on the mystery conventions and the mystery genre. While researching we made sure to note a few down so that we could make sure to avoid them and stand out. There were also a few conventions we had to make sure we employed in order to properly fall under the mystery genre. One convention that we avoided is that it is incredibly common to have a mystery film revolve around some sort of crime that the heroes need to solve. Our mystery film was not one with criminals or detectives so it was easy to avoid this convention. What we did instead of this convention was the mystery of a curse on the main characters and discovering why they were cursed, if the curse was real or not, and how to remove the curse. One convention we used was suspense. This helped create a sense of mystery for the audience as we don’t know whether or not the final plan by the main characters will work or not. Luckily, in the film, we see the final plan works and they no longer have to worry about a curse.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KdxbNM2I_nwXC-i4HdlyfWRP9licBcPfVOAeoFY3TFc/edit?usp=sharing