CCR questions

 Today's blog post is mainly for me to briefly answer each question.

• How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Thrillers are known for their intriguing scenes and creating suspense.The protagonist is constantly going against the antagonist.The protagonist in "Spiraling" is Serena. Serena planning her "escape" and running away just while her mom is downstairs is already creating suspense because it has the audience off their seat wondering, is she going to get caught? Is her mom gonna hear her? How is she going to mess this up?Serena represents a lot of teenagers today. Easily confused kids who let their emotions get the best of them.From the start of the film we can tell this wasn't a thoroughly thought out plan and Serena is easily doing things in the moment without thinking of the next step. The mom is challenging the average motherly stereotype. Coming home from work, work attire, making dinner, and sitting down on the couch to watch the news and relax.

• How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Our target audience is females and males ages 17-26. We went with this target audience because the average target audience for thriller movies are males ages 18-30. We brought it down a little bit and directed it towards females too because of the strong female leads in this movie. Which already challenges the thriller genre, as most thriller star a male. This is also a movie about a teenager and her emotions throughout the film which we thought a lot of young adults could resonate with. We plan on distributing our film opening on youtube.

• How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

This was a long process but we finally made it to this point. We started off stuck, unable to come up with an idea when finally we took inspiration from Gone Girl but with all the changes made you wouldn't even know how we got this idea because it's nothing like it anymore. Once we created our storyboard is the when we really got ourselves together and finally had a real vision. Filming went very well. We experienced a few difficulties but nothing we couldn't work with. We had to deal with our reflections, glares and a few bloopers because of course this was a very dramatic opening so sometimes it was hard to get a scene without laughing but it caused no problems. The research really helped us get create Serena's character. From the outfits to the smeared makeup I really believe we were able to achieve the look we were going for.

• How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

So for filming we kept it simple. We used an Iphone 11 to film. We mostly had hand held shots because a few were tracking shots, close ups, zoom ins, etc. For the still shots we were able to prop the phone up against the window sill. We originally planned on using a ring light but we decided natural lighting would look better because we were filming at night and we wanted to make sure that was clear to the viewers. We then moved the videos to our laptops where we import them into adobe premiere pro and started our editing. Editing took a lot of cropping, focusing, and adding effects to. We also used Canva to create our production company logo which helped us to successfully create a typewriter look.