My media studies film was the most time-consuming assignment that has resulted in a perfect outcome. I used multiple elements to produce my film, including a research phase, a planning stage, and a production stage. While this process took me around 13 weeks to complete, my stages were evenly distributed with 61 blog posts. These blog posts helped me to create the complete concept of a struggling teenager in high school, which is why the film came out so well.
As for my research stage, I researched multiple categories that contributed to my film. I researched mental illnesses, mise-en-scene, foley artists, and directors of films with genres like my own. Researching mental illnesses and disorders allowed me to understand my target audience from a unique perspective, which gave me more ideas on how to accurately represent the things that they struggle with mentally. One variant of disorders that I went over directly was anxiety disorders. There are many different anxiety disorders, but I specifically educated myself on the disorders that most teens struggle with more in this generation. This new education granted me the opportunity to show the traits of these disorders in one of my own characters, showing how depression can change a person’s life which vouches for the teenagers who go without mental health treatment.
Not only did researching mental health help me with my film, but researching foley artists helped me as well. I analyzed the works of famous foley artists like Sanaa Kelley, Joanna Fang, and Caoimhe Doyle. They each had their own achievements as foley artists, and analyzing their work gave me the inspiration to create my own foley creatively. Foley is known for making film seem more realistic while blending in, which was exactly what I chose to do in my film after careful analyzation of these women who have done life-changing things for the world of foley art in film.
Equally important was my research on directors. I chose to focus mainly on Felix Van Groeningen, who created the film “Beautiful Boy.” His film is about addiction, mental health, and how families deal with stressful situations like the one that his main character puts them in. While my film is not about addiction, the mental health issues that teenagers struggle with can be similar to it because often, they have the same problems with compulsivity.
Now, my planning stage is a lot different compared to my research stage. This was because I chose my locations, created waivers for my actants, proportioned the elements in my film, and I analyzed specific scenes with transitions that I wanted to include in my film. Choosing my locations for film was incredibly important to me, because figuring out where and how to portray a student in their natural environment was essential for my film since it featured a teenager. I created a Reece report for multiple locations, which included a high school, a neighborhood, and the inside of a house. While this does not seem like much, giving the cluttered effect to my film was needed in order to provide viewers with the perfect view of my main character.
On top of this, the waivers that I had my actants sign for the possible dangers that some scenes may create in my film added depth to my understanding of how a true film director picks their scenes. Creating a waiver also added to my risk assessment, which analyzed every risk to its full potential, and it reminded me to educate my participants on how to use some items to fulfill the image that I created in my head of my film.
Also, creating the proportions of my film allowed me to include a plot without extensive thinking. With research, I found out that a film should include twenty-five percent of setup, fifty percent conflict, and twenty-five percent resolution. So, I created a chart that demonstrated my plot. It included the exposition, or the introduction, a falling action, the climax, the falling action, and the denouement, or conclusion. The proportioning of my film helped to end the planning process quickly, allowing me to have more time for the actual production of my film.
Finally, I analyzed scenes with specific camera movements that I wanted to include in my film. I specifically analyzed a scene from Twilight, when the main character went through depression of her own. The directors broke the 180-degree rule and completely spun around the main character as a transition from season to season. While I did not use this specific transition, focusing on another creative element like this one gave me more confidence to express myself in my own film, and to break the media “rules.”
Meanwhile, my production process was the most important part of this process because it took up the most amount of time. I set designated days to film in different locations for myself, which eliminatedstruggle in the process. The purpose of the different days for separate locations was to record every scene in the film at one location, which kept this part of the process brief. To put all the clips together as one singular movie, I imported the clips into CapCut, an editing software, and I adjusted them to fit every scene accurately.
The production mainly consisted of editing, which was hard at some points in time. I struggled with the transitions of my film, along with the titling scene, the overlays, and the sound. The transitions in my film were basic, but they created enough of an effect on my film to the point where it gave it more drama, fitting into my genre of short film. My titling was more intriguing, especially since it was in the opening sequence of my film, which included my production company. This allowed the entire film to stay in reference to my company. The overlays in my film were an important part of my film, especially since they took up around sixty percent of my film. These overlays represent the social world today, since most teenagers use cell phones constantly, including social media. I decided to keep my film on the creative side, drawing inspiration from movies and tv shows that include social media texting on the screen. I used photos of messages with the background cutout before animating them to demonstrate what a real text message strand looks like.
I also included sound in my film, focusing on the music aspect the most before foley sound effects. I had chosen the song “anything” by Adrianne Lenker, which created emotion for my film. The reason why this created emotion was because most audience members, especially from my target audience, enjoy this song and they relate it to themselves with its sad mood. I recorded the song, and I ended up using it in fifty percent of my film, part of it during the conflict and climax of my film, and the other half of it during the concluding scene of my film.
On top of these elements, I also created my minor tasks which include an Instagram account and a postcard. My Instagram essentially advocated for my film the entire time, showing small clips from it, along with the release date, and hashtags that may spread the word about my film quickly. My postcard also has its own effect on audience members, because it’s creative enough to be seen as special. The awards on the front of it can give audience members an inside look at how good the short film is, which can create intrigue.
Overall, every aspect of my film going from the research process to the production process was thought of carefully. Between my research on the common traits of mentally ill teenagers, the focus on creating a good film, and the production of a film that shows how teenagers struggle with finding out who they are as a person, the film shows audiences a soothing portrait that displays hardships as a growing human.
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