Researching Media Texts - 1

Genre Research

Hi Blog! 

So, Renn, Vicky and I met up on Sunday for about 2 hours to have time completely to ourselves to discuss what we wanted the story to be about and narrow down a genre. It was a super productive meeting, and we decided on Coming of Age. This genre is going to be a fun way to capture where we are in our current filmmaking careers, because coming of age very often refers to teenagers, specifically with the challenges that come with being in that awkward time in your life. Our film also will include some aspects of the drama genre, since the main character will experience several conflicts, and the story focuses on how they will deal with such issues, which is among the main characteristics of the drama genre. 

Coming of age is one of the most common genres when it comes to having a target audience of teenagers and young adults, which we all agreed on in the beginning. Our target audience that we can best represent would be the ones similar to our age and interests, which is why we instantly knew that we wanted to go that route. The main characteristic of a coming of age story is that the character shows growth as their life progresses and they get older. They often tend to focus heavily on one main character's point of view, since it is effective to emotionally attach to one character and watch them grow, just as we do when we see the people we love mature in their life. For that reason, we want to make sure that we exhibit that pathological approach in our own film. The growth from adolescence is an experience that everyone understands, so even though our target audience would be people currently experiencing this transition, we also acknowledge that the older audience may also find interest in our story for nostalgic sake.

Coming of age is a genre present in many forms of media from books to television to short films. Some of the full-length films that we are taking heavy inspiration from would be Turning Red, Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Here. These films are all perfect for the classic coming of age genre, and they all could contribute different points to our research. 

As for short films, there are a few that we watched as a group to get some inspiration. The ones we took heavy inspiration from were "Why Can't We Just Be Ghosts?" by Patrick Jang, "Words that Don't Exist" by Lorenzo Zottoli, and "The Seed" By Aaron Tharp. We thought it was really important to study some short films as well, since that is what we will be creating.

I am going to do a deeper analysis on these examples soon, so stay tuned!

Project Timeline

Hi blog! I wanna start by mentioning that Renn made a Google calandar with all of our due dates and shared it with Vicky and I so that we are all on the same page. Here's a photo of the Calendar.

2/17 - 2/23: Planning

 We are taking until the 23 of February to plan what exactly we want our short film to be about and how to tell that in a 5 minute time span. It may not sound like much time, but the three of us spend a lot of our daydreaming time thinking about stories, and we can see each other's vision really well, so we didn't need too much time. We also plan to meet up on sunday (the 22) to work through the beginning middle and end of our story to solidify our ideas and make sure we are all on the same page.

2/24 - 3/04: Writing/Designing (Pre-Production)

Renn and Vicky are going to STN on February 26th, but they are planning to work on the screenplay during their free time, and hopefully have it done by the 4th of March (a few days after they get home). I am going to be working on designing the set while they do so, allowing us to film as soon as the screenplay is done. We want to save a lot of time for editing and potential reshooting, so we wanna film as soon as possible. 

3/05 - 3/13: Production

Speaking of, we are going to try to film between the 4th and the 13th because we wanna get it out of the way before spring break (the 14-21). All three of us have plans over spring break, so while we are still going to be posting on our blogs in that week, we will not be doing any filming, cause we will be in different places. Since our filming may take multiple days, we wanted to leave over a week to do this, as we are all super busy people. We also decided to have a maximum of 2 actors in it so we didn't have to work around too many people's schedules besides ourselves.

3/14 - 3/27: Editing/Graphics (Post-Production)

We are giving ourselves until the 27th of march to do all post-production, so that would include editing, adding graphics/animation (we are deciding on if we want to do that), credit sequence, or and reshoots. This may seem a bit overkill because that leaves us with 14 days left before we need to have it 100% done, but we are not procrastinators, and are actually super excited to get working on this, so we would rather have it done so that we aren't rushed.

3/28 - 4/10: Finalizing/Critical Reflection

Like I said, we want MORE than enough time to finalize, get feedback from peers, and make any last minute changes. We also need to write our critical reflections in this time, which we want to be well developed, so we will need a decent amount of time. 

All of our project timeline was based on what posts are required of us for our blog posts that Ms. Stoklosa assigned. I am super glad that she included this, because if she didn't we would have had a much harder time deciding how much time we need for each portion. Here's a copy and paste of what blog posts to expect for the next 8 weeks:)

Week One (2/17-2/22)

two postings

-posting #1 should introduce your project choice for A level

-posting #2 should be a project schedule/timeline (what you wish to accomplish each week)

Week Two (2/23-3/1)

four postings

-one post on chosen genre research

-three posts researching real media texts of the same genre (discuss at least two media texts within each post)

Week Three (3/2-3/8)

four postings

-one post should focus researching social media pages for content similar to your project/genre choices

-two postings should reflect research or planning (outlines, layout drawings, storyboards, shooting schedules, etc)

-one post should summarize the group meeting

Week Four (3/9-3/15)

three postings

-each postings should reflect detailed planning (outlines, layout drawings, storyboards, shooting schedules, etc.) and/or production processes

Week Five (3/16-3/22) – this is Spring break – plan accordingly

three postings

-two postings should reflect production process, reflection on key moments, changes to project (why), etc.

-one posting should reflect research on print components similar to your project choice/genre

Week Six(3/23-3/29)

three postings

-posting should reflect production process, reflection on key moments, changes to project (why), etc.

-begin researching/planning for Critical Reflection 

Week Seven (3/30-4/5) 

three postings

-posting should reflect production process, reflection on key moments, changes to project (why), etc.

-Researching/planning for Critical Reflection

Week Eight (4/6-4/10)

three postings

-one post reflecting final, reflective comments

-one post must be a link to or embedded A level project (all components) with short textual reflection/introduction

-one post must be the Critical Reflection for A level project

Beginning my Portfolio Project

 Hi blog!!!!!

    We officially began our portfolio project for A Level, and I am SOOO Excited for it. I am working with Vicky (who I worked on the documentary with) and Renn who is super talented from what I have seen! The three of us decided to work together because we all have different strengths, Vicky has a lot of experience in editing and filming with a camera, Renn has a talent for graphic design. I like to think I do a pretty good job at developing stories have experience with social media, since I am the media manager of the band and color guard at our school. Since we are required to create a social media page for whatever option we choose out of the four, my experience will come in handy.

 
  Speaking of the options, we were thinking through which one we should do. The options were a short film package, a music promotion package, a film promotion package, or a documentary package. We immediately all agreed that we did not want to do the film promotion or documentary option, since they were not really the best options considering our skillset. That left us with the media promotion and short film packages, and we spent a solid 30 minutes going over the pros and cons of both. Here's the list that we created.

In the end, we decided to go with the Short Film Package because at the end of the day, this project is more than just a submission to pass the Cambridge exam. The three of us want to create a piece of art that represents who we are at this point in our lives, and although that could happen with any project, the short film allows us to have nearly complete freedom in the story that we tell and how we tell it. We have started discussing plots, but nothing decided for sure yet.

Documentary Critical Reflection

Here’s the link to my final documentary:   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wwqWTKNV4btJFRIvsDvEBAyZ5jR-C6cB/view?usp=drive_link

How did your research inform your product and the way it uses or challenges conventions? 

Our documentary, Winter Guard: The Floor is Our Home, describes the Cypress Bay winter guard team and emphasizes the importance of community and connection through the activity. Since it is an uncommon activity, we did not have many examples about the same topic, so many of the B-roll shots we had to come up with on our own to highlight the equipment. However, we had a lot of inspiration when it came to the interview shots. 

It was really important to us that we did research on the genre of documentaries, since neither me nor Vicky had ever created one before, and it is very easy to mess up the product with small mistakes. We took inspiration from full length documentaries, op-docs, and episodic documentaries to see a variety of approaches and create the best product that we could. 

For our interviews, we wanted to place everyone that we interviewed in a different place to keep it visually interesting. We got this inspiration from the documentary we watched, called “Exit Through the Gift Shop” because although the topic of that documentary was something completely different, that documentary had amazing interview shots. 

 

 When we placed our interviewees in front of the camera, we thought that it would be best to place something relating to the activity behind them to tie even the visuals of the interviews into an aspect of the activity. For example, we placed a flag behind Vivi to represent the equipment and trophies behind Julia to represent the competition aspect. The piece we took inspiration from made us learn that interviews are just as important visually as the B-roll. 

When it came to the B-roll, Vicky and I decided that we wanted the camerawork to have a lot of quick motions with the equipment to represent the intense feeling of the spinner when the equipment is in the air. We wanted the dance-based shots to be slower movement to represent the grounding feeling of dancing. This challenged the typical documentary style of having mainly still shots to capture the topic. It was really important to us that we found a way to highlight the duality of dance and equipment in the guard world because it is a very clear difference, but they work together to create a perfect combination. The way we chose to go about getting that across was through camera movement. 

How did your product engage with audiences? 

The target audience of my production varies from people who participate in winter guard/dance and enjoy seeing content on it, to people who have no idea what it is. The purpose of the documentary was to share what makes winter guard so special and why no matter who you are, you would find something to enjoy, as well as the more specific purpose of highlighting the Cypress Bay Winter Guard. However, the main audience would be high schoolers who are looking for a place to belong and an activity that gives them that and more. 

My production uses a variety of techniques such as the upbeat audio in the beginning to grab attention, the frequent changes in interviews, and the use of B-roll to hold the attention of the audience. We realized that it is much more interesting to see a product that does not feel stagnant, and if frequently changing visually. So, in the visual aspect, the pacing was intentional to progressively get more in depth to keep the audience engaged. 

 I do, however, think that it may have been a better option to put music in the background. Our original idea was to highlight the sound of the flags, since that is what we hear during rehearsal, when the B-roll was taken, however it did feel a bit flat at moments. We did find a lot of music that matched the vibe really well on Bullet Proof Bear, which is a great royalty-free audio website. We ended up using it in the intro, but not in the rest of the piece, which was not a creative decision that I would make again, since the lack of music was a missed opportunity to have that aspect to help develop tone. 

I also believe that it may have been a little hard to see the interviewee’s faces, since the lighting was a bit difficult to work with, and may have also affected the way that the audience perceived the tone. However, the B-roll was intentionally very bright and well lit, so I think it balanced out. 

How does your product represent social groups/issues? 

It was really important to me that out of all the routes we could have gone with this topic, we went with how connection is the root of it all. We considered making it about how much work it is, focusing on one person, a variety of options, but the one thing that makes people stay in groups like this is connection with your team. So, one thing we really wanted to emphasize was that anyone could join, and it was a great way to be social, which is a common issue for many incoming high school students. It is also really relatable, so people will feel connected to the story, even though it is such an uncommon activity. 

The production has a variety of interviews to allow people to connect to at least one of the individuals. For example, I chose to include Yadrien (the boy) in the interviews because I thought it was important to highlight that winter guard is not only for girls, like most people would assume when they find out that it is dance-based. Yadrien is a spectacular member, which is another reason why we gave him a solid chunk of the documentary, to show off his skills and show what people aspire to be like. 

We also thought it was important to make it mainly about the students, since we are high school students ourselves, and we knew how to communicate the way we think in an effective way. However, by including Erick, we added to the idea that once you join Winter Guard, it will have impacted your life for good, possibly even to the point that you want to pursue coaching it as a career. This ads to the varying age in the representation. 

In most situations, it is much better to have a wide variety of ages, genders, etc. Included in the piece, but since our target audience was teenagers, we didn’t necessarily feel the need to interview parents or anyone outside of that age range, since it would throw off the purpose of connection within the team. So, within the team, we included individuals who were young freshman (Vivi) all the way to developed and more mature seniors (Maria). This was also a decision we made instead of only highlighting more experienced members because we wanted to emphasize how any grade can participate, and all work together to be one team despite the age difference. 

Overall, this project taught me a lot about developing a story in the genre of documentary and seeing all the aspects come together to create that story that brings light to some important messages for any High School student.