1. Critical Reflection
Kara Parsons

2. How does your product use or challenge conventions?
In contrast to other film openings, we developed our main characters pretty well for the opening of the movie. By the end of our opening, the audience has a good idea of each characters background and personalities as well. For example, we made sure to show that the girl came from a wealthy family, by showing her family airplane hangar which symbolized her wealth. Also, from our research on suspenseful movies, we noticed that they had anxious sounding scores of music, so we made sure to incorporate that into our opening as well, so the audience can get the vibe that something bad is going to happen to the girl. It was also important for us to use a lot of foreshadowing as well, so the audience was aware of what is going on early on in the opening, and so the viewers can anticipate that something is going to happen to the girl. For example, we made the girl seem very isolated by using several long shots of her on her run, showing how isolated and vulnerable she is. We used this technique from several movie openings we watched during our research that the use of long shots on the victims were commonly used.

3. Link to a score we used to build suspension in our film:
Establishing shot of girl at her airplane hangar showing that she comes from a wealthy family
Long shot of girl running to emphasize her isolation
Link to a score we used to build suspension in our film:

4. How does it represent social groups or issues?
Our film represents the conflict of the cliché man vs. woman, were of course the girl is taken as the victim in our film by being kidnapped. In our opening, we made the girl appear as very vulnerable throughout the film by using long shots and showing her struggle to get out of her kidnappers arms, but fails to actually escape him. Another social issue we used was the main conflict in our opening, kidnapping. Today this is a very common issue that is seen as very frightening to many people especially young kids and women. We also incorporated a unique way to give reasoning for the kidnapping, by introducing another social issue by having the girl being allowed to be released if the ransom is paid. We did this by having the so called “hit-man” that was kidnapping the young girl for his boss he works under, which we identified in the film in the close-up shot of the text message the boss sent to the hit-man who was kidnapping the girl.
Close-up of the text message
Scene with girl struggling against man

5. How does your product engage with audiences
Our film is targeted towards teens, as well as young adults. Our film would be classified as not only suspenseful, but also as a drama because further into the movie, the kidnapper and the girl will fall in love with one another. Our movie would appeal to both the male and female audiences since we incorporated the action and suspense into it for males, as well as for the romance side of it which is targeted towards women. Our movie does showcase some aspects of action as well as drama which makes it appealing to a variety of different audiences. In our opening, we began to develop that the kidnapper was treating her somewhat nicely, by calling her “Sweet heart” and reassuring her that she was going to be fine and that he wasn’t going to hurt her in the scene with her tied to the tree. Also, by having the kidnapper refer to her as sweet heart and him being nice to her, it makes the audience become fond of him as well.

6. How will the product be distributed as a real media text?
Our product would be distributed through popular movie streaming sites, such as Netflix and Hulu. I think the product would do very well in this type of area because it is where our main target audience watches movies, being teenagers and young adults. Not only that, but it would also be accessible through Redbox and other movie renting places to help advertise the movie so it is well publicized. If our movie does well in these areas, then we’d soon release it into the movie theaters to further the popularity of our film.

7. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
My ability to work with the iMovie editing software has improved throughout the duration of the editing process. At first, it was all very overwhelming and a little frustrating to get all of the shots off of the iPhone 6s we had used for filming, onto the laptop. Once we actually uploaded them all, I was able to experiment with all of the things we could do to every shot and I soon became very familiar with it. Also, I learned how to find a musical score we liked that we felt fit our film, and how to put it into our film. Overall, I am now very experienced with editing movies and I feel I could do it with no problem

8. How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware,and online - in this project?
For our project we used mainly Apple products. We used an iPhone 6s 64-GB for the filming, since we were very familiar with using it to record, and also because it has an ample amount of storage for us to use for filming. For editing, we used iMovie on a MacBook Air, since it was easier to take all of the shots we recored on the iPhone 6s, straight onto the laptop. We also did use Adobe Premiere Pro to convert our film to an MP4 file, so we could add in our production company animation that we had created by using Adobe After Effects. We also used Adobe Premiere Pro to add in the text, but the majority of the editing was done in iMovie. Finally we then uploaded our video onto YouTube.