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.