1. How do your products represent social groups or issues?
Our products represent many social issues. The short film shows the issue of how teens put a face on to be socially presentable. In the film, the characters are shown as laughing and happy around friends, in a social setting, but are going through harsh problems at home. This issue of teens faking a smile is very present in today's society. Teens are constantly feeling like they need to be received as perfect to others. This constant pressure to be perfect leads to other problems, which we show in our film. For example, in the film each girl has a struggle, one has an eating disorder. Eating disorders are a heavy issue for teens. The need to be perfect consumes their mentality and causes these body image issues. Another issue shown is an unstable household. One of the characters had fighting parents. She witnessed the physical and verbal abuse and fell victim to it. The last issue among the characters was teen pregnancy. This problem is shown through the hurt of the character. The teens are all shown in our film as crumbling under their problems while forcing themselves to put a face on and be perfect. My group and I also showed this in our other products. For example on our website, we created a color theme that went from bright whites to dark blacks. We did this to show the contrast in a teens social persona to their reality. This design is shown in our other forms of social media and postcard. All of the products represent the many social issues our film has by having them evident in the film and in our designing technique.
2. How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of 'branding'?
The elements of the film's production create branding for our film. The film's theme is how anyone can fake a smile in public, but will have a tough reality at home. So when it came to branding for this, we wanted a trademark that would be noticeable, but not obvious until the audience saw the film. Almost like how you don't see that someones being inauthentic until you truly check on them and pay attention. This was another form of our branding, we wanted everything to have a hidden meaning, just like how the characters hide their problems from each other. We felt that the audience would think this was clever and stood out from other films. Another way we did this was using our website. Our website had our film name and general information, like how to contact us or where to watch the film. When designing our website we made a specific color scheme. When you first reach our website the colors are bright and creamy whites, but as you scroll deeper, the colors turn to shades of black. Doing this shows how someone can seem bright to others but their life is dark. Like stated before it catches the audience's eye and leaves them questioning. This was also done with our postcard. For this we divided the front into two sections, one with the bright color and one dark. We then placed the title of our film in the middle, allowing for some of the letters to be on each side, another display of the switching of personas. The color scheme we used in the website and postcard create a sense of branding for our short film.
3. How do your products engage with the audience?
Our short film engages with the audience by relating to them. Our film is directed towards teens. It deals with the social issues of being a different person in public when you’re really hurting inside. My group and I can relate to this. It’s been seen in our own lives and in others. So, we wanted to show the consequences of continuing this and encourage the audience to be real with others. We also relate by being girls. While this problem is in all teenagers, teenage girls are more likely to suffer under the problems that our characters had in the film. Our age was also a factor in relating to the audience. The issues of our film are struggled with most by high schoolers. My group and I knew that by making our characters our age and having the audience know that we were also high schoolers, we could reach them in a similar place and relate to the pressure of growing up. Another way we engaged with our audience was through our website. Our website had all of our social media so that the audience could check out the film's process and await its final product. Our social media was another way we engaged. We made sure to post and keep our audience guessing about our film. We were able to reach the audience through these apps. We could get our film out to more teens because social media is wildly popular among them. Our short film engages by relating to the audience and providing interaction.
4. How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
When starting this project, my group and I had to research our film genre, know it’s conventions. Through research, My group and I were able to understand what most drama films were like, And how we could incorporate some of these conventions. Throughout this film we used and challenged many conventions in the genre of drama. One of the conventions we used was the structure of our film. The shorts plot is very similar to the basic genre plot. Our film has a beginning then contains a rising action, has a lot of drama in the middle and then ends with a big event. This is very conventional for drama films. We stuck with this plot because it went with our idea and best conveyed the main idea of the film, while allowing the genre to be obvious. Another convention we followed was the characters. In drama films it’s very common for the characters to be teenagers. This is because of how complicated it is to grow up and the loads of drama to be shown. So, my group and I made our characters teenagers. My film also challenges the convention of a happy ending. Many drama films end in a resolution, that brings the audience some clarity. However in our short film, we end it on a cliffhanger, that leaves the audience at the edge of their seats. The structure, characters and ending of our film are all conventions our film had or challenged.
