1. Creative Critical Reflection Shannon Taylor

2. The Movie or movie opening, “American Dream” ties into the Drama/Romance/Music genre and fits into the standards or conventions of that genre due to its backstory and ability to live up the expectations that a normal drama/romance/music movie would provide. Some of the influences that lead me to label the movie the American Dream and come up with the idea of what it would be about were movies likes, Walk the Line: A movie based on the life of Johnny Cash and his rise to fame, Begin Again: A movie about a bad break-up that later turns into a musical phenomenon, and Once is about a couple who meet on the streets of London fall in love and make music. With “American Dream” the main character, Jonah, comes to America to pursue his dreams of becoming a musical sensations but later in the film, his scouting agent, Emma corrupts his and drags him into a world of chaos. This brings the ‘drama’ to the film: the in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes, the ‘romance’: the love interest between Emma and Johan, and lastly the music portion: when Jonah comes to America and makes music to be famous.development How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues ?

3. The social groups in which I want to entertain is a generality. There is no bias towards a certain race, or ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexuality. The film produced is meant for everyone to see. Just like any other Drama/ Romance/ Music movie, the audience goes across the board for everyone to enjoy. How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues ?

4. The movie engages with the audience by introducing a story about a boy named Jonah who comes to America and makes it big, but throughout the movie is slowly corrupted and slips from the top. This will engage the audience with the basic love story and some of the younger audience can relate to Jonah, due to his love for music and dreams of being discovered by a music scout. I feel the audience will be drawing to the light and warm colours of the scenery and the mysterious lifestyle of the story of Jonah and Emma when the story takes off. The audience will be pleased with the storyboard and will understand the plot right away How does your product engage with audience and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

5. In order for the movie to produced, marketed and distributed I would have to plan a meeting with a distribution/production company, like The Sycamore Production company, mentioned in previous blogs and have them review it and have it distributed to the movie theatres around the world and later turned into DVD’s. While going over the basic needs and how much money I expect it to make the day it hits theaters will be discussed. How would you get it out to the movie theaters? How will i be produced, distributed and marketed?

6. My production skills at the beginning of the class and project weren’t very strong, and being in the class has gave me the confidence to handle the camera and label myself as a filmmaker. I learned the basic needs to have a good sense of angles and shots will filming certain scenes whether it be for a music video, a commercial, or a two-minute movie. It all about the angle and having understanding of what you're doing. Before this class I used to watch different music videos, movies and commercials on television and on the internet and think to myself that filming those kinds of things take little or no time. But the most challenging part of filming is the editing process. I have much more respect for directions and producers worldwide; now that I have gained my own experience with filming in different locations or having to find a new location due to Location Liabilities or having the right cast to even writing a script and producing a storyboard to make everything perfect is a hard task to achieve. In the end, this class not only helped me with filming but with the film industry. How did your production skills develop throughout the project?

7. During this project the integrating technologies used to create this project was an amazing application software called, Pinnacle Studio 18. I incorporated this into the making of the project by uploading all the footage from the digital camera onto the computer, drag it to the application and start editing. On the application it allowed me to download music and place it under the footage so that both scenes would play in sync. This software was amazing and easy to use. How did you integrate technologies-software, hardware and online-in this project?