CR !!
Good morning and good evening. The short film me and my teammates made was released last Sunday. It was about two friends and represented a struggle between cultural and internal differences. Lucky, the main character, is a believer of superstitions and sticks closely to her beliefs. Charmie, our secondary supporting but also maybe main character, is dismissive and ununderstanding of Lucky’s beliefs, most notably about her 7 years of bad luck, even going as far as trying to disprove her. Subtly, Charmie at the beginning was placed in low angles to show a sense of power and throughout the story becomes on the same angle level to show how she started to believe Lucky. Through costuming, Charmie is wearing darker colors to metaphorically show how she is “in the dark” about the superstitions, how they are very real but she is disbelieving. Lucky, in contrast, wears green (the color of clovers, a representation of good luck) and pink (a color representing innocence) to show where her beliefs lie, in what is considered a more childlike mindset. The only two scenes she is in just dark colors are the beginning and end, where she gets bad luck through the mirror and ladder. Lucky is also the only character given narration, essentially, we get a window into her mind to make scenes more clear, it is a deep voice to show a passage of time between when it happens and when the story is “told” as voice changes typically happen throughout puberty. Quite a bit of non-diegetic music and sounds happens as well to match the mood of the scene. When Lucky’s curse is gone, she gets happy music, when she makes a joke, a mario sound will play to try to get the audience to laugh, as the short film is still a comedy.
For the short film production, two things were made to promote the short film. A website and a digital card, designed in a way that could be to be printed and handed out. The website is made with purples, a color rarely found in nature, a mysterious color to go with the superstitious theming. The card has design elements to make the unluckiness peak through, for example, there is a flower on the card that is a sign of unluckiness in what is a basic, easy to understand, quick google search, flower language. This is to keep it easy to understand and research. It is a small film, so pack filling it with hard to understand references and themes isolate a branding and message that is trying to be created. Branding is very important when marketing, so some of the first things the group did was make a logo and try to use a singular artist song, to create a sense of cohesiveness, when you hear something it should sound similar to each other. It was all edited by the same person for the same reason as well. When making previous films, it was edited by multiple people, and the editing styles clashed enough where it did not feel like it fit in the same movie, so having it edited by the same person allowed a story that flowed better. A better sense of…branding, that is right! The thing that feels out of place the most is the card, but that will be explained by the ways the product engages and connects with the audience. In the branding aspect though, it allows for a broader self expression, especially because the movie is a comedy and should be a little lighter. So if the audience first engages with the film through the card, it shows a brighter side to the film and reflects the genre a little bit better.
The produce made engages with the audience created by being board enough to capture a large margin and strict enough to get people who will engage and think about the product. It is a superstitious comedy movie, it is meant to make the audience laugh while playing into a faux-seriousness about superstitions. Lucky finds a penny on the group but it happens to be tails up, she already picked it up however, and that means bad luck. This is meant to make the audience think about the times they have done something similar and accidentally given themselves bad luck, it is relatable while also adding a little humor. This movie could have very easily been a horror movie, but the team wanted to poke fun at superstitions but also to maybe lighten audiences up, getting bad luck will put someone in a bad mood, so if the movie can make their day better at instead making a person laugh at said bad luck, is the best opinion. The team wants to engage with the audience on a personal but outsider level. How many times has someone made fun of something another person believed was real? Its theme is mostly “play along,” what is the harm in humoring a friend's belief? It does not affect a person in the long term, even if it is a little silly. It is meant to make a person think about their actions and how they talk and behave with their friends, to be a little nicer and act a little kinder with things they find ridiculous. Now for the card, it is lighter than the two other products to make it easier to see and provide more contrast between the words and background, the words are bigger and limited and the picture depicting things are very large. This is to help either the visually impaired or color blind. It is important to try to get a wide audience, so cutting massive groups of people for things they can’t control just does not do well for audience engagement. That is why the card, a massive branding and sharing device, is so different in comparison to style.
The research in making this short film was the funniest part. First, the team had to research superstitions we could put in, apart from the obvious ones like a mirror, black cat and ladder that we could use. I made and researched most of the superstitions, bad luck and created dialogue. This is because I needed things to flow semi-well, and work with the contrast we had to deal with. But my partners really came through with the materials, one of my partners saved our butts with the last scenes, as the actors in the films (me and our other teammate) did not have a large ladder. The research is also how we named, put references and added comedy to the film. Someone got hurt? What is something you most think of with video games, Mario! So we added a Mario hurt sound effect. Something to signify good luck? A notch golden apple in minecraft. The team is a fan of video games, clearly. I also thought of scenarios to indicate bad luck was at play, stepping in poop in a clover field and getting a 50/50 wrong in Kahoot for example. The way the editing was made forms and uses the conventions of comedy, things are exaggerated to spark humor from the audience. These are the ways me and my team used conventions, weird humor and research about the differing opinions of humor and conflict to write a short film revolving around friendships and superstitions.
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