1. How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
As discussed in the article "What is The Current State Of Diversity in Science Fiction Film" from A Plus, while the science fiction genre has begun to see more diverse representation in its casting choices, it is still a genre that is dominated by the presence of white men. This is reflected in the genre's traditional target audience, which, when looking at the audience demographics for most science fiction films, seems to consist primarily of young men between the ages of 18 and 29. However, as the audiences of these productions have become more diverse, the representation in the productions has become more diverse as well. So, our choice to have a female main lead joins in with the current trend of defying the old genre conventions of representation in science fiction. However, our choice to have a female lead was not meant to be some kind of statement of defiance against the traditional norms of the genre. We just sort of decided to have a female lead.
Our opening and the following short film are meant to serve as a critique of modern dating culture, in which people rarely form any meaningful relationships and just hook up with a bunch of randos they'll never meet again. In our short film, the dating culture is not so much revolved around sex as it is just around meeting as many people as possible. It's something of a numbers game in which people will compete against their friends to see who went out on more dates. The overall message is that dating has devolved to a point where there's no real romance or emotional investment involved, which is a viewpoint held by many when looking at the rise of hookup culture and apps like Tinder.
2. How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
Our short film is about dating, something people in our target audience are either a) looking forward to, b) starting to do, or c) have some experience with. Since films relating to dating and romance are typically more appealing women and girls, we could possibly also draw in a female audience for the dating aspects while drawing in a male audience with the sci-fi aspects.
The traditional audience for sci-fi as previously mentioned is males in the age range of 18 to 29. According to YouTube demographic numbers, 62% of users are male and 81% of 15-25 year olds in the US use YouTube. This makes it the perfect platform to release our short film on as it is frequently used by a large number of people in our target demographic. YouTube is also frequently used to upload sci-fi short films. One good example of this is the channel DUST, which regularly uploads CGI science fiction productions. Beyond digital distribution, we could also show our production at popular short film festivals such as Aspen Shortfest and HollyShorts Film Festival. These would provide an opportunity for our production to get some acclaim and build up excitement before a release to the general public.
3. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
The first two weeks of the project was comprised almost entirely of research. I looked up sci-fi genre conventions, analyzed film openings, and looked at examples of small-scale science fiction films. After that, most of my research was planning or planning for the planning. I made an outline for the scene, an outline for the storyboard, the actual storyboard, and I helped Sil write the actual script.
When it came to production, we had to adapt suddenly when our actors were no longer able to show up due to this whole coronavirus situation. We ended up having to fill in the roles ourselves, something that I was not and am still not happy about. It also meant that we needed more outside help in the form of Sil's boyfriend, Gus, who did the filming.
I feel like all the projects we've done so far have contributed to this one. The one word film taught us about editing and shot composition. The Foley sound project taught us about the importance of sound design. The film pitch project taught us about researching genre conventions and target audience. The music marketing project taught us about appealing to a target audience through marketing and distribution practices. All of these assignments contributed to some extent in helping us work on this project.
We started off this project with a somewhat ambitious idea for a unique project and have ended with a product that I don't think I'm personally quite satisfied with. However, considering how hard I typically am on myself when it comes to my own creative productions, I doubt anything short of actual movie quality would satisfy me.
4. How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware and online - in this project?
The two big pieces of technology we used the most in this project were an iPhone for filming and computers for editing the visuals and audio.
We didn't use much hardware in our filming other than a tripod for filming. Since our opening was filmed in an open restaurant, we couldn't really do anything with the lighting or have any large-scale filming equipment even if we had some.
When it comes to software, the first big one is of course Blogger. I've been using it since February to log pretty much every single thing that has happened in the process of working on this project. The second is WhatsApp, which I've used to communicate with Sil for the purpose of scheduling and discussing how to allocate work. Third is HitFilm, which is the software I'm using for adding the audio into our opening. Since we couldn't record good audio when originally recording our scenes, I'm using HitFilm to add in our lines after the fact.
I originally planned on using WeVideo, a website we've used for past projects, when doing my work, but Sil didn't think its audio features were that great, so she got a recommendation that I used HitFilm Express. Since it was a new software, I obviously had to spend some time learning how to use it. Fortunately, their website had a reference manual for new users and I only had to know how to use a few features to work on audio editing, so learning to use it was pretty easy.
I won't be including the final reflection on the project in this post since we're not quite finished with it yet. I'll make some notes on that once I finish working with the audio. I expect my next post will be about me doing said work on the audio editing. See you then.
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