1. Ashley Ferguson Period 7
Critical Reflection
Ashley Ferguson
Period 7

2. Question 1
How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups and issues?
My product uses conventions to create a suspenseful and action packed movie that keeps the audience both scared and entertained.
One of the main conventions my group used was text that said “the morning of.” We used this to create the effect that it is a flashback, and we are going to get to see what happened to the main character. This use of text will capture the audiences attention right away, and they will want to see what happens. We took this inspiration from the movie Gone Girl. They also used “the morning of” text to create the meaning of a big event taking place.

3. Question 1 Continued
Another main convention was our use of sound tracks. We had two different ones included in our opening. We took inspiration from two of the movies we researched Gone Girl and Bourne Ultimatum. In the beginning of our opening we chose an upbeat sound track like in Bourne Ulitmatum, we did this because the beginning has a very fast pace. The music we chose is meant to get the audiences’ adrenaline pumping and get them excited for the movie. As it leads into the forest scenes we used a creepy sound track like the one used in Gone Girl. This sound track created a suspenseful feel that is meant to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. It was also a low soundtrack so all of the diagetic sound could be heard.
The next convention we used is a long take. We took inspiration from the movie Maniac. In the movie it is used to show a girl alone. We also used this to create a sense of desolation with our character as she rides alone down a long road.

4. Question 1 Continued
We also used low key lighting as one of our main components. We got inspiration from the movie Bourne Ultimatum, a movie that also has low key lighting in the opening. We want to use low key lighting to show that there are no sources of natural lighting in the room the girl is in. The low key lighting also gives us a chance to highlight certain things with spot lights. We used this technique in one of our scenes to show the girls bruises and that she was in a really creepy place. The darkness also creates a scary effect because things always seem scarier in the dark.
Although we did get a lot of ideas from our extensive research, we also came up with some of our own ideas. For example, we put in a POV shot of the stalker’s perspective to show that the girl was definitely being watched. It also added a cool effect and a different perspective. These are only some of the many conventions we used in our opening.

5. Question 1 Continued
Our product represents a teen/ young adult social group. It reaches out to people who may have an interest in helping to stop kidnapping. It does this because the movie brings attention to the issue of kidnapping. Teens will be able to relate to our movie because It shows how reliant people are on their cell phones today, and in the end phones may not be there to help us.

6. Question 2
How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
Our product engages with a teen/ young adult audience. This is because kidnapping is a relevant topic mainly among young people. Today young people, primarily girls, are the main targets of kidnappers.
We found that the movie The Call also had a female teenager being kidnapped. The pictures show the similarities to the teens scenarios. The more normal pictures show hat the girls are your everyday teens and that getting kidnapped could happen to anyone.

7. Question 2 Continued
Our movie also engages in a teenage audience because they can relate to the characters in our film. We purposely used a teen as our main character to clarify who our movie is targeted towards. Although our movie does have some touchy subjects discussed our overall goal was to create an entertaining movie that people would enjoy and want to see. The movies we researched, Gone Girl, Maniac, The Call, and Borne Ultimatum, also have the same entertaining qualities to them that we took inspiration from for our film. To distribute our film we will first have it shown in theaters like Regal, after it is in theaters for a few weeks we will have it sold on DVD and Blue Ray. The last step we will have for distribution is putting it on Netflix and Amazon.

8. Question 3
How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
Throughout this project my skills in production have developed even more. I have accumulated a passion for film making throughout the year, and put all my past experiences from our practices into this opening. There are always new things for me to learn whether it be in the editing software or in our camera techniques. Surprisingly coming up with a story line for our film was the hardest out of the three films I have made. It took a lot of time and changes to get everything perfect. I think that the main reason for this was that we all wanted this movie to be our best yet since it is our final component. Since I already had knowledge on how to use Adobe Premiere Pro I just learned a few new features. For example, we learned out to edit our text and give it a gradient effect so it was unique to our movie, and fit our theme. We also learned how to create a smooth ellipses of time with black space in between that fit well and was not awkward.
Gradient on text

9. Question 3 Continued Original After brightness change
Lastly we learned how to adjust the brightness of our clips. This was very helpful because it aloud us to create a dark and creepy mood that was not originally there. Overall I feel that over the span of not only this project, but also the year, my production skills have improved tremendously.
Original After brightness change

10. Question 4
How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware, and online – in this project?
We used lots of different technology to create and produce the film. The two main things we used were my camera ,the Canon Rebel T3i, to film all of our scenes, and Adobe Premiere Pro to edit all of the clips together to form a cohesive action/horror film with a sound track and text. We also incorporated technology in our movie by making the main character use her iPhone to try and contact her family, Also the phone is used in the last scene when her mom finally picks up. This is pictured below. To share the film with our class and teacher we used YouTube to create a link. We also used the website WordPress frequently throughout the filming process to keep our teacher updated on our progress.