DROID A Level Creative Critical Reflection

Here is my final Creative Critical Reflection for DROID. Thank you.

DROID A Level Creative Critical Reflection

DROID Final A Level Project- Short Film, Website, and Postcard Advertisement

Here is our final project for Level A!

Our short film, DROID.

Here is our postcard advertisement.

And last but not least, here is our website!

http://iamdroid.weebly.com/

Research on Branding

Branding is something that we have to make sure we establish in this project, and because I was still a bit confused as to what branding really means, I did some research online. I found this great website that explains the basics of branding.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/77408

I especially loved this quote- "Simply put, your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from your competitors'. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be."

We will have to create the same sense of cohesivity throughout our project, and I think we can definitely do that. We already have an underlying tone and a matching color palette to match it, so we just have to find out the best way to portray that would be. 

Filming for movie

Filmed the rest of the movie today! Here are some pics.

We will be editing footage and sorting shots, and I'm very excited to see the final result.

Website Creation!

We have finally decided on a platform to create our website! Weebly.com is a great tool for creating an original website, and they also have many many special tools to make a website unique and creative. Because our film is a simple science-fiction short, we decided on a minimal look for our website.

Our websites URL will be IamDROID.weebly.com, and it will have a very minimalist look overall to match the robotic, steampunk kind of look we are going for. The picture in the background will be of our characters and important motifs in the story.

We will also have four subpages within our website, much like the Urbance website I did my previous research on, and each will talk about a different aspect of our film. Each page will have a short blurb on what that tab is about, like short character biographies and summaries. 

Website Research

A couple of months ago, I discovered a project on Kickstarter that I loved. The project is called Urbance, and it is a developing animated short. I was thinking about what formatting and style our own website should have, and I remembered this project due to it's similarities to our film. It is also a project aimed at young adults, and it is also has a science fiction setting.

I loved their use of colors and characters to convey a very sleek, cool look to their overall film, and they also use the font to draw in the young audience. My favorite part about this, however, is their organizational formatting. 

They have many subpages within the website that open up to different aspects of the project, and I would love something like that for DROID.

Silent film research and inspiration

Silent films are an extremely rare type of media made today, and especially not in a movie targeted to young adults. This website is an amazing resource for inspiration and examples of silent films made in the past. 

Creative Inspiration: Nearly No Dialogue Films

In this website, I watched many of the short small clips of the silent films, like the movies Vogue made with Jessica Chastain and Kate Winslep, and I noticed that one thing they all have in common is a very well selected music in the background and in Jessica Chastian's case, very clever and humorous use of sound effects and exaggerated reactions. 

Our film DROID is not a completely silent film, for there is a little dialogue, but we must find a way to incorporate the same exaggerated sound and loud actions in our own film. Steve, who plays MAC, is a fantastic actor, and he really embodies the character's subtle nuances with acting and expressions. Kirsten, who plays Dell, also utilizes her body language to further the story. 

Science Fiction Conventions Research

Today I did some more research on common conventions of the science fiction genre, and how that affects the audience that watches them. I found a website that explains very clearly common uses of conventions.

http://www.life123.com/arts-culture/cinema/science-fiction/science-fiction-genre.shtml

Here is a quote about advanced technology, like our droid.

"Advanced Technology
Early science fiction writers and editors focused on the hard science of science fiction, and much of that incorporates the development of advanced technology, or creative ways to utilize existing technology. As the last century has seen big advances in technology, it's not difficult to imagine some traditional sci-fi technology that could be very real in the future."

I know that our film utilizes a very common convention of a robot as the main character, but that can also help us, not just harm us. Because a robot is so commonly seen in many film, it can be instantly recognizable to our audience and therefore not be so intimidating to watch. Our android is also very relatable, which our youth audience will instantly be drawn to. 

DROID Short Film Intro

Finally, after much planning and organizing, here is DROID, our short film intro!

Creative Critical Reflection

Here is my creative critical reflection of DROID!

DROID Creative Critical Reflection Prezi

Filming the DROID intro

We filmed the intro today at my friends house, here are some pictures!

Now, onto the editing process....

Inspiration- The Way He Looks

INSPIRATION POST-

I was curious about other films in this genre that also explore themes of loneliness and isolation, and I remembered one really good movie that I watched this year called The Way He Looks. It is a Brazilian coming-of-age foreign film about a boy who feels very alienated from his peers due to his disability- he's blind. Through several turning point experiences, he finds a way to accept himself and to even find a boyfriend.

This film is most notable, I think, for the storytelling and use of motifs and color scheme. The color scheme used in this movie included many very warm, dark colors like blue, black and green. It perfectly conveyed the tone of the film, the poignancy and also the dull world that the main character experiences due to his lack of eyesight.

In our film Droid, I would also like to incorporate meaning behind the color scheme. Mac will be decked out in grey and blacks, dull and awkward in a large, colorful and confusing world, and Dell's outfit will be full of bright colors, conveying a vibrancy and excitement into her character.

The Way He Looks Official Trailer 1 (2014) - Brazilian ...

Music part 2

Today I searched for royalty free music online, because I don't think that we are capable of writing and producing our own music for this intro. I have a very specific theme in mind, and it takes forever to sift through all the different sound clips to find the perfect one. I'm still looking, but the style of music I'm searching for is a very robotic sounding, low key electronic track. I'm using the website incompetech.com.

Music Notes

There will be music playing throughout our entire intro scene, with no dialogue at all. I feel like music can convey a very powerful message when utilized correctly, so the soundtrack we choose must fit the tone of our intro. Music options include non-copyrighted music and music made on moviemaker. The overall feeling of it should be melancholy, poignant, yet not depressing. It should just convey a very quiet existence of Mac, his routine morning, and his deep loneliness that he experiences daily.

Character Names and Titles

We've decided to go a kind of clever, kind of cheesy route with our characters names. We knew we didn't want the names to be too complicated, we wanted to portray the androids as very human, with human names and human emotions. The name of our lead character will be Mac, short for Macintosh, and our female androids name will be Dell, short for Adelle. I think its quite cliche, but I also enjoy the cheesiness.

However, even though we have our character names done, we still don't have a title for our short film. I want it to be related to technology or something in the sci-fi genre, but nothing is coming to me! Inspiration is null, and I feel pretty lost. There were absolutely no suggestions from our group today either, although they said they loved our idea. Binary boy? Electronic emergence?? I'll get back to you later, hopefully with a title and a plan.

Visual Comedy

I watched this video around last year, but it still remains one of the best videos I've ever watched on filmmaking and comedy. Edgar Wright is actually one of my favorite directors of all time, and the Cornetto Trilogy, which this video talks about, is one of my favorite film series. The analyzation of modern comedy losing it's special qualities, becoming very lazy, is something that I feel is very true.

This also perfectly adds to our video because although our video will not exactly be a comedy, we want there to be humorous elements. The video speaks about how most jokes are now told only through audio, and mostly dialogue, but our short film will not have a lot of dialogue at all, and so we must incorporate some techniques that this video talks about into our film. We must remember that the screen is our canvas, and that every shot, every clip we use must be significant and purposeful.

https://vimeo.com/96558506 

Group Day and Title Sequences

Today, my group met up with two other groups to collaborate and bounce ideas off of each other, and to offer up advice and/or criticism of each others ideas so far. From what I learned today, many of my classmates are far braver than I, and many are doing projects by themselves. Both of them are doing something different that we are, one doing a documentary on the college application process from a perspective of a teenager, and the other  is doing a magazine spread on heath and nutrition, with an emphasis on bodybuilding.

Today, my research consisted of looking at titles and seeing which font we want to use and what we want to call our short film in the first place. I looked at this website called artofthetitle.com, and I was inspired by many different fonts and styles. I think our film would be a very quirky, indie feel to it, so we would not choose a big blocky font for our title. We would choose perhaps a more unique, flowing font, and as for our actual title, I want something that correctly and accurately conveys the tone of our film. Something that is different from the influx of indie short films, something that would make the audience interested and spark their curiosity.

These are the top 10 title sequences of 2014; I enjoyed watching them and I hope we can draw some inspiration and qualities from these into our own short film.

http://www.artofthetitle.com/feature/top-10-title-sequences-of-2014/

Film Ideas

This week, we finally started our final projects. We'll be working on our film opening first, as that is our AS level project. We will be creating our film opening and short film together, as one. Our original idea was a story called Reina, about a lesbian teenager growing up in south Florida, but as we discussed our project, we realized that 5 minutes was way too short to actually develop our main character enough so that we would be satisfied with the result. The time constraint was a real problem, and we knew that we had to have a storyline that is simultaneously simple, yet poignant. 

We entertained many ideas, some decent and some downright humorous, but we eventually came to the conclusion of: ROBOTS IN HIGH SCHOOL! Well, specifically, one sentient robot in a high school dominated by humans, and his journey throughout the day. We really wanted to explore coming-of-age themes like loneliness, alienation, and growth, and what better way to do that than to portray our protagonist as a literal cyborg, separated from humanity in nearly every way? 

To open our short film, we watched several exceptional film openings, and one of my favorite ones that I watched was the Napoleon Dynamite film opening. It stood out to me in its exceptional simplicity, yet it was never boring, and I really want to recreate the POV shots in our own film opening. We've decided that our film opening should be of a mixture of POV shots and regular shots, all depiction our robot's methodical morning routine, from waking up to brushing their teeth to eating a hearty breakfast complete with a cup of oil. 

In my mind, our opening would establish what type of character our robot would be, and it introduces the most glaring fact- that our protagonist is not a human being, and that that makes them different from anything out viewers could relate them too.