Time to get organized...

 Ok so. As we wrap up on the actual film itself, I should start considering how I plan on tackling the questions asked for our Critical Reflection (CR for short). This is an essay of around 1000 words basically asking 4 questions about what kind of message our production itself is sending to the world.

Here are the 4 questions:

How do your products represent social groups or issues?

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

How do your products engage with the audience?

How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?

Here are my notes on the CR that i took from class;

So for the first question, I think its important to explain

    - We reviewed productions like Fleabag, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, and Deadpool, when we first formed our     idea, and then when we changed it we looked into films like Mean Girls and The Craft to inform our           ideas for w*tch!

    - We specifically honed in on how they write for a character breaking the fourth wall when we reviewed

    productions like Fleabag

    - Our Genre is dramady

    - I think the research we did that impacted production the most was fleabag, and mean girls, we really

    took a lot of notes on how mean girls wrote their characters for the main trio, and we adapted a lot of        how fleabag would break the fourth wall into our main character claire.

The second question is a bit more complicated. Making our products reallly engage with the audience is important. I think the primary we did that was through the social media and the kind of messaging we used. 

We posted several posts such as the one on the right, indicating the target audience for our film. This communicates that our target audience (teens and young adult, primarily women) should watch our film.

Our post card engages the audience by introducing the atmosphere of the film. It features a front graphic, in line with the branding on the social media, and on the back a short description of the film, and where to go watch it at Lightning Film Festival. 

The film itself engages audiences by capturing the emotions of viewers. Everyone has felt alone at one point, and thats the kind of emotion we are trying to channel.

For the 3rd question, Our branding makes a very clear statement about the film. The posts themselves are either formatted as tarot card, or feature them as elements. To do this, we scanned the deck we used from the film to create several brand elements. The font usage is also super important. We use 3 fonts; Angelic War for titles, Slacksluger for headings/subheadings, and Shrikhand for body text. These fonts are all very flowy, with the heading and title fonts being detail oriented.

We also focused on a very gothic design language, commonly associated with witches or otherworldly concepts.

For the fourth and final question, It's important to show that we represented highschool girls, and more importantly their social groups. It happens very often that teenagers, sometimes make decisions that they don't agree with to "fit in," this often can leave others feeling abandoned. This is what we tried to represent as the main conflict in our film. 

We also represent witches in our film, in which it is important to consider that there are real practicing witches in our world. And while non of the witches in our film are specifically of any denominational organization, its important that we represent the practices were adapting properly. For this we used a real tarot deck during the production, and used a real spread that is actually used by practicing witches.

 

the ACTUAL last day of filming

 So we've made an addition to the script! meaning we need to film for another day unfortunately.

Basically, in editing we realized that there isn't really any moments between Claire and Sarina during the timeline of the film. Like sure, theres flashbacks showing their relationship, but nothing that indicates where their relationship is NOW. 

So we decided to add a little tid bit of a conversation, between the montage and the Tarot reading that basically serves this purpose, as well as having Claire take more of an active role in the story by confronting Sarina.

So we called back just Sarina and Claire to shoot this scene, and we also decided to last minute shoot something on the black void that we may or may not use:

In Ariana Grande's music video for "No Tears Left To Cry" Ariana dramatically spins around, and leaps off a building.

What captured my attention about this is that in the behind the scenes, it look extremely simple.

Music Video

Behind the Scenes

So we decided to take a shot at it, record it very quickly, and if it turned out bad we wouldn't use it

We shall see how that goes in the edit, but the next update about this film specifically should be the film itself so STAY TUNED

FILMING (the third and final day)

 Yesterday's shoot was a success! We started by using black trashbags to board up my entire house so that the daylight wouldn't show through (since it is kind of an evening scene)

You can see the trashbags if you look hard enough

Once our first two actors arrived we wrapped up recording some flashback scenes that were missing from the previous shoot! Next we started on the all the montage shots. We wanted to have a more dramatic shift, so we used natural lighting for the montage, up until the tarot reading where we dramatically shifted to a more creative style of lighting.

My dog in the red and purple lighting 

(he wanted to be included)

 This scene actually ended up taking until 10 pm to shoot :( but its okay because we wrapped :)

2nd DAY OF FILMING!!

 So today we actually had major success filming!

One of our actors was busy with work so we had to kind of be weird about what scenes we shot. We ultimately came up with this: today we would film all the flashbacks and black void scenes, as well as the scene right outside of Andreina's house and the new opening. This would allow us to get all the location shifting out of the way so that tomorrow we could focus on just filming all the single location stuff.

So today about an hour after I got home from work, the Crew came to my house to film, we started setting up my sisters room to be Claires room, and we had to take a quick detour to pick up the black backdrop from my dads friend (my dad lent it to him over the weekend) Once we got back we did the lighting set up for the backdrop which looked like this:

Our actors mostly showed up late :/ so we finalized all the character posts while we waited for them to show up!

So after our actors showed up we started with filming the bedroom scenes, then we shot everything in the void, and finally around 6:30 we filmed claire arriving to Andreina's house. 

Tomorrow we're actually filming the plot so stay tuned to see how that goes!

Creating the socials

 So one thing we kind of neglected to begin was the social media BUT THATS OKAY because were doing it now and its going to be amazing.

Today we had our cast and crew come over to my house take pictures on this black backdrop thingy!

Aneesa and Nico had this amazing idea of putting them into tarot cards so we actually loved that idea and went with it.

Here's an example of what the raw photo looks like:

Now heres the photo once we designed the tarot card and put some fun filters over it

I actually really like this because it feels like a clear and cohesive brand that we can use for all of the posts to come!

Writing win

 OK SO today 2 of my team members and I met to actually finish the script so that we could actually shoot things on Sunday when we film!

We went back and fourth with ideas about how to end the story before we ultimately decided on changing it AGAIN!! But it's a long road to greatness so it's ok.

We ended up deciding to have the void play a more meaningful role in the story, as well as scrapping most of the scene since they mentioned random people that didn't really mean anything. We also replaced Will with Sarina, since we didn't want to bloat the cast, and we already had 3 characters that go through barely any development. So we made sarina a past friend of claire's, giving claire a better motive to try and break into the popular girl group. We also slightly rewrote the opening so that it would fit better with our new story.  

So without further ado here is the final script:

The schedule is conflicted...

 OKAY so something has come up during the main weekend we were planning on filming! YAY!

basically our primary antagonist, andreina, MIGHT take a tour of the college she is going to on that weekend. KEY WORD: MIGHT!

This means we still need to write the script and have it ready by the weekend in the case that she decides not to visit the school. Either way, this creates conflict for us because its essentially hard to ask 5 people to keep their weekend open on the CHANCE we film something that day. 

Were also already around a week behind our original schedule, meaning we'll only have around a week to edit, and less time for our critical reflection, which is not the best. I hope we'll be able to film next weekend so that we can whip together atleast a draft of the film in the edit in the 3 or so days following, so that we can have 2-4 days to FINALIZE the film as well as create the many many social posts that are needed.