Critical Reflection

 • How do your products represent social groups or issues?

• Our product represents social groups and issues by expressing the idea that “only you can change your future”. Many people in the world struggle with the fear of the uncertainty of what is to come, their future. Our film, Wednesday Drive, portrays the idea of a doomed future however as the film continues the audience is able to see that the choices you make can really change the future. With each choice, April, the main character, made she gets closer and closer to getting past her death that seems to happen on that day. You control your destiny with the actions and choices you make.  So you have the ability to alter your future. Many people in this day and age are influenced by social media and allow that to dictate their opinion on themselves and their future. Our film helps portray a sense of self control to dictate your own future. People feel powerless in a world where they feel as if they have no control of their future, when it’s really the opposite. In the film, April is destined to die. The day repeats and April makes a different choice each time, ultimately leading to being safe and saving lives. This portrays the message that no matter what happens, you control your future and you can make choices that will affect you for better or worse. This film affects anyone living as a young adult or teenager in the 21st century where technology greatly impacts people’s lives and their opinions of themselves. Our film challenges those negative ideas with the positive message that you are in control of yourself. 

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

• The elements of our production work together to ultimately create a full brand that really fits to our whole message. The brand we created is a sense of “life control” through a mysterious genre and plot line. In the film April, an 18 year old girl, has a day that ends in demise.   As she gets a chance to relive the day over and over, she eventually makes the choice that changes her life.  She is alive and wakes up the next morning. Our film promotes “life control” through its plot and also through its marketing. The marketing used in this film also follows along with a mystery genre to engage and grow an audience to receive a positive thinking role. The mysterious genre brought to the audience and the message portrayed reaches a large audience. The mysterious genre was portrayed through filming, dark colors on the postcard, and website. This film was also branded to reach a large directed audience by being shown at a very popular film festival. The branding of this film was mixed to reach a large audience, while being engaging, and portraying a positive message that many struggling in life need to hear. The positive message that “you control your life and you make choices that impact your future in one way or another” is the main aspect of branding while the appearance is more surface level branding. Any good film has deeper meanings to anything they do and that is how our branding comes together, to create the different layers.

• How do your products engage with the audience?

• My product engages with the audience by being visually appealing, modern, and easily accessible. Involved in our final movie we included the actual film and advertising such as postcard and website. In our website we used a dark color scheme to enhance the curiosity of viewers. Our audience would be more interested to look at the information because of the enticing and ark color scheme. We also linked and used social media accounts making our final movie advertised in a modern and accessible form. On our website people could click on the link and be taken where needed. This increased the views on social media because convenience is the key to getting more people to take the time to look at advertisements. The postcard is similar when it comes to accessibility and modernization. On our postcard, while also having the names of our social media, has a QR code viewers can scan. This interactive method engages the audience while also playing into capturing the modern large audience. The actual product engaging the audience was it being visually appealing to viewers. This aspect was created by using different technical aspects like camera angles, camera movement, and editing aspects. A combination of these specific aspects and music, makes this film appealing to the audience. All of these conditions together created a product that engages the audience on a visual and physical level. Our product is enticing to view, due to many detailed aspects we focused on to engage the audience in multiple ways. We also engage our audience by sending a message many people in this day and age need to hear. This message attracts viewers and engages them on a personal level. 

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

• We researched our products extensively. In the postcard and website our research focused on ideas about color schemes and mainly just made choices off of our genre preference. This included dark color schemes and crisp color differences. In this project most of our research went into our genre type. My group and I came up with an idea we wanted to turn into a short film however, we could not figure out what genre we should categorize. After doing research and developing our film idea, my group and I came to the conclusion our film best fits under mystery. This is because of the questioning problem throughout our film that comes to a conclusion in the end. Although we follow the conventions of mystery when creating our advertisement we did not follow conventions when it came to our film. When filming we used very upbeat and happy songs although it was a mystery film. This challenged conventions, however we believed that this upbeat twist would still enhance the mystery and curiosity of the viewers. We had an upbeat twist to create a greater mystery allowing the viewer to want to watch more. We also went along with conventions when it came to advertisements and websites. On both, we used dark mysterious colors which match the mystery genre our film portrays. Personally, I think this match of challenging and matching conventions creates a nice unique balance that entices viewers to come see something “familiar” while also opening the doors to what is believed acceptable.