PORTFOLIO PROJECT LINKS

FILM OPENING FOR *MAN*SLAUGHTER: OPEN

CCR MEDIA PROJECT #1 - PRESENTATION W/ VOICEOVER: OPEN

CCR MEDIA PROJECT #2 - ENHANCED PODCAST: OPEN

Final Reflection on Portfolio Project

I'll admit; I hated the CCR portion of this project. Well, hate's a strong word but... I genuinely couldn't bring myself to do it out of my free will, ESPECIALLY when I started my spring break a day early and I had all that time to play games, read my books, watch my show I needed to catch up on, etc. I eventually got it done but honestly, it felt like a chore the entire time. I will say, though, I did love making the film opening. I think because it was a genre I enjoyed and a plot I actually admired so much, I had so much fun writing the script and coming up with names and plot twists and scenes and all that came with making this film opening. Remind me to ask if I legally can write a story/book based on this same plot with the same characters and all the other details or if Cambridge owns it now? I don't know but I like to write and I'd love to write out the rest of the story based on the opening itself. 

Anyway, I loved working with Vicky and Bella and I'm actually pretty happy I got closer with them! They're good people and we've always known each other but not enough to work on a project together but I worked up the courage and asked and look at us now. I loved the way our opening turned out and I actually am pretty satisfied with the way my media projects for the CCR came out as well. This project was definitely something but I already know I'm going to be wishing to be doing this instead of the essays for the other half of the exam. God, I dread those essays.

The portfolio project definitely gave us a lot of freedom which was honestly a good and bad thing for me but all I know is that... I would not recommend this to anyone.

Also, STREAM MAYHEM (this is the album that got me through the CCR portion of this project):

ALBUM OF THE YEAR (2025)

Post-Production of CCRs

The post-production process of the CCRs was way more easier than actually making them. For the presentation, it said I needed to export it as a movie and honestly, I had no clue how to do that so I screen-recorded each slide of the Canva and let the voice-over play out for the entire thing. I then cropped it so you couldn't see my tab bar, menu bar, etc. and only the slideshow so it appeared as if it was an actual "movie" and then I converted it to an MP4 online.

The podcast, though, was a little trickier than the presentation. I had to first put all the voice memos into iMovie which I have only used once and that was for the One Word Film we did earlier in the year. I also put in the ad and I put it between the questions I answered as a little intermission. I then had to trim the audios as in the beginning or end, there'd be too much silence and then at one point, I was listening through the audio and I realized you could hear my family in the background of one of them. I had to re-record that one and since I was impatient and just wanting to get it over with, I think I had to do more retakes of those lines than I had to do during production of the podcast. Anyway, I finally got the podcast put together and I added up the times for both the presentation and podcast combined!

TOTAL TIME: 10 MINS 43 SECS

Phew! Thank God it didn't go over 11 minutes. Anyway, I think it's safe to call my work here done!

Now it's time to embrace my cats since it's their birthday today and I've been working on this since I woke up.

Production of CCRs

For my two media projects, I chose to do a presentation with a voice-over and an enhanced podcast. I purposely avoided doing anything involving filming because for my film opening, I worked with Vicky who had access to high quality filming equipment and since I was doing my CCR alone, I wouldn't have had access to that equipment therefore the difference between the film opening and CCR would've been visible and make my CCR appear "bad" right off the bat.

For my presentation, I made it in Canva since I know doing voice-overs was easy due to the Film Pitch Project we did earlier in the year. I first made the slides and made sure to not put many words on the slides themselves but just key words as I can elaborate more on them in the voice-over and make sure the "audience" listens to what I say instead of being distracted by a busy slide covered with words. I then went through each slide and typed up in Notes what I'd say in every slide. Here's my script for the whole presentation:

SLIDE 1 - Hello. This is one of my media projects for the Creative Critical Reflection portion of my AICE Media Studies AS Level Portfolio Project. My name is Juan Villarreal and I’ll be showing you a presentation with voice-overs.

SLIDE 2 - In this presentation, I’ll be going over my answers to Questions 1 and 2.

SLIDE 3 - Question 1: How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

SLIDE 4 - Isolation, victim versus monster, and violence are some of the common conventions of horror that we used and challenged within our film. 

SLIDE 5 - Isolation can be both a physical and psychological feature in horror. Physical isolation is when characters are separated from the rest of society in an inactive location somewhere while psychological isolation is when the characters are going through something mentally that others cannot see or relate to. In terms of our film, the main characters, Elena and Jackson, are physically isolated as they spend the entirety of the film alone in a big empty house with no help whatsoever coming to save Jackson. Psychologically, Elena is isolated as she has this mentality that if a man doesn’t meet her standards, she is required to kill them showing that no one can relate to her psychologically. Jackson is also psychologically isolated as he secretly is a serial killer as well and therefore is clinically insane and cannot relate to others.

SLIDE 6 - Victim versus monster is the common concept in the horror genre that basically represents the protagonist in the movie being the victim trying to win against the antagonist which can be a human “monster” or an actual creature. This is one of the conventions that we challenged as our main character IS the “monster” and the other main character who is in a way her enemy is the victim being hunted down.

SLIDE 7 - Another convention that makes up the horror genre is violence. Violence can be anything from a slap to the face to the dismembering of a body! Of course, we didn’t have neither of the two shown in our film opening but we did show something in between. We had the dead body of a man bleeding out in one of the scenes with a bloody knife and a pair of bloody gloves that can be seen inside of a trashcan that is filled with a bunch of bloody towels.

SLIDE 8 - In the horror genre, gender stereotypes are commonly applied to characters. For example, women are almost always portrayed as the protagonist that’s constantly in distress and in need of protection from the antagonist, who is usually a man. We’re in a period of time where men don’t always have to be the heroes saving the women from the bad guys. We confronted this social issue head-on by having our female protagonist be the killer needing to be protected FROM and our male “antagonist” be the victim needing to be protected. We also represented the social group of young adults by having online dating being Elena’s way of connecting with her victims. It’s a common idea that young people constantly rely on everything to be digital nowadays, even their love lives, and so we represented that directly by having Elena find dates through Tinder only to end up killing them once meeting up.

SLIDE 9 - Question 2: How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

SLIDE 10 - Since an important aspect of the film revolves around social media, or more specifically dating apps, we settled on a target audience of young adults which really is Generation Z. Our main character, Elena, and her victim, Jackson, are both in their early 20s and they are the common users of dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, etc. We figured a younger audience, such as Generation Z, can find themselves relating to these characters more than an older generation who don’t rely on online dating as much.

SLIDE 11 - Within our production, we included a few features that some young people may associate or at least relate themselves to. For example, the first few seconds of the film opening was Elena's hands placing a vinyl into a record player and starting to play it. I know of so many young people who collect physical media whether it's vinyls or CDs or cassettes. I also know several more popular artists with young audiences and they not only sell physical media but several variants of them to increase sales which leads to an increase in purchasing of physical media. Another example would be the showing of the Tinder app on Elena's phone as once again, most of online dating apps have young people as their primary consumers.

SLIDE 12 - We plan to make our film available to audiences through film festivals and Patreon. As we are just starting off, we obviously don't have the budget nor the fanbase to release our film in major theaters worldwide. By showing it at film festivals where people go to open themselves up to unpopular and newer films, we can easily attract huge audiences with an interesting film that will amaze audiences and make them ask for more. We also chose Patreon as we can promote it online everywhere and if people decide to watch, we can sell it for a small price (ex. $10) and not only gain profit but potentially gain new fans!

When it comes to my enhanced podcast, this one honestly wasn't as hard as I thought it'd be. I first made an ad before coming up with a script for the actual podcast. For the ad, I used the text-to-speech in Google Translate and I just made up a random app that was promoting a free trial to use their app features for users to make their own podcast. Once I finished making the ad, I quickly came up with a suitable name for the podcast and I started working on my script. I already knew I wanted the podcast to have its entirety be spoken by a "guest speaker" which was me and I was answering commonly asked questions that fans have asked. I made sure to answer the question as naturally as I could and making it appear as if I came up with them on the spot instead of having it written down previously. I had to do several retakes because on many occasions, I'd be talking for so long and then right when I was reaching the end of my line, I stuttered and messed it all up. 

Research for Question #2 of CCR Post

Question 2: How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

-How did you arrive at your target audience?

Well, since an important aspect of the film revolves around social media, or more specifically dating apps, we settled on a target audience of young adults which really is Generation Z. Our main character, Elena, and her victim, Jackson, are both in their early 20s and they are the common users of dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, etc. 

SOURCE

-Discuss how your production choices, content, etc. work to engage with your target audience

Within our production, we included a few features that some young people may associate or at least relate themselves to. For example, the first few seconds of the film opening was Elena's hands placing a vinyl into a record player and starting to play it. I know of so many young people who collect physical media whether it's vinyls or CDs or cassettes. I also know several more popular artists that have young audiences who not only sell physical media and several variants of them to increase sales which also means increasing the purchasing of physical media. Another example would be the showing of the Tinder app on Elena's phone as once again, most of online dating apps have young people as their primary consumers.

SOURCE

-Discuss how you plan to make your film available to audiences

We plan to make our film available to audiences through film festivals and Patreon. As we are just starting off, we obviously don't have the budget nor the fanbase to release our film in major theaters worldwide. By showing it at film festivals where people go to open themselves up to unpopular and newer films, we can easily attract huge audiences with an interesting film that will amaze audiences and make them ask for more. We also chose Patreon as we can promote it online everywhere and if people decide to watch, we can sell it for a small price (ex. $10) and not only gain profit but potentially gain new fans!

SOURCE #1 SOURCE #2

Research for Question #3 of CCR Post

Question 3: How did your production skills develop throughout this project? 

-Reflect on how your process evolved throughout the production

Personally, I've only ever made a film project in middle school for my 8th grade film class but even though we were given a tripod, that was the only "professional" film equipment I have ever used. One of my group members, Vicky, is in Cypress Bay TV Production meaning she had so many ideas and so much equipment that she introduced to me and changed my production skills significantly. For example, she had an actual professional high-quality and complex camera that I refused to touch because I was afraid I'd break it. She had bright and strong lights that she borrowed from her CBTV class that she set up and changed the colors of. She also used both my script and her own storyboard combined to ensure that the process went smoothly. I personally never looked back at the storyboard after making it for the projects I've done in this class but Vicky relied on them so much that it helped me realize how helpful they actually are. I went from thinking my phone camera was a very strong way to film, relying on memory and how I imagined scenes, shots, angles, etc. instead of actually drawing it to life to make reaching it for feasible, and way more other differences me and Vicky used to have when it came to filming.

-Discuss how you begin with research and planning – offer specific details about both of these processes 

We started planning by just sitting near each other in class and brainstorming ideas depending on the genres we had in mind. When we finally reached the idea of opening the film with a normal-looking woman setting up a normal-looking dinner but adding a twist, we instantly started planning the darkest and jaw-dropping twist. We established on that murderous element and we started taking notes on different scenes, shots, angles, etc. that we had in mind for the opening and once we were done with the notes, I typed up a script and Vicky drew up a storyboard. Once we decided on a filming date very last minute (the day of the filming day/Sunday, February 16th), Bella made a list of the props we needed and we all checked to see what we did and didn't have in our houses. Vicky had mostly everything which is what led us to choose her house as the filming location but we were missing a few things such as the rotisserie chicken and the fake blood. Bella found the fake blood she had from a previous Halloween year hidden somewhere in her closet and I went to Publix and bought the rotisserie chicken which we didn't even end up using til hours later when we got to that shot.

-Discuss your approach to production. What did you have to change or adapt as you worked on the project? 

As I said before, I changed my usual habits of filming based on what I had in mind and what I was feeling in that moment to relying on it physically. This means using scripts, storyboards, prop lists, lights, professional cameras, camera stands, etc. I was definitely open to it once we started getting ready for filming but I got more comfortable with it as the process went on. I loved using all of the different professional equipment by the end of it especially when Vicky knew how to use it and incorporate it into the film correctly, demonstrating how useful it could be.

-End with a reflection on where you started and where you ended.

I went from relying on my mind and phone camera for my previous film projects such as my music video in Film 1 in 8th grade and my One-Word Film for AICE Media Studies AS this year and now I opened myself to using professional filmmaking equipment for the most important project of this year. 

Research for Question #4 of CCR Post

Question 4: How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware, and online – in this project? 

-Begin by discussing any technologies that you used while producing the project 

We used a professional camera, lights, and tripods.

-Discuss hardware – cameras, lighting, microphones, phones, tripods, dollies, sliders, etc. 

The professional camera we used was a Canon T8 Camera with a Canon Zoom Lens and a Canon 50 ML Lens. The lights we used was a RGB Light Kit.

-Discuss software – planning tools, editing tools, animation tools, graphic design tools, filter creators, Blogger 

We used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the entire film opening, nothing else.

Did technologies help you solve problems? 

Yes! When it came to the flashback sequence, we needed something that'll enforce that sinister feeling and also make it obvious to the audience that the scene was not set in the present time the entire opening had been in. We ended up switching the lights to red to help solve this problem of ours.

Did you need to learn new technologies to achieve a specific aspect of production? 

Me, personally, no as Vicky knew how to use all her technologies to achieve all the aspects needed in our production.

Did you run into any obstacles with technologies?

We couldn't figure out how to turn on the light for a few minutes but we eventually got it to work. Our camera quality was also very choppy and the frames were glitchy and Vicky had to phone her TV Production friend to help her fix the settings on the camera. Both these obstacles did set us back but not that badly.