Reflection Questions: Keep Your Friends Close

1. Reflection Questions: Keep Your Friends Close By: Kayla Buchanan

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

3. How does your film fit the typical standards (conventions) of the genre? • It does fit the Romantic Thriller genre as a thriller emotes a sense of fear. The opening makes sure to build up suspension then let the movie calm down after the specific event to build slow suspense while introducing character development. • Helps to set up the planned romance that would be continued in the rest of the movie. The romance aspect is blended into the movie as a plot device to enhance the thriller in the film.

4. How does your film represent social groups or issues? (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc.) • The film is supposed to show a gay relationship. Yet since it is the opening, is not clearly established. • It also allows to show a male (Remington as Luke) in a situation of weakness. As men in Romantic Thrillers are seen as stoic or ambiguous in the scenarios they are faced with. Yet, it reverses the element of a female being chased after by the stoic male and it is twisted with a male trying to figure out his counterpart’s motives.

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

6. How does your project get the audiences’ attention? What will make people stay to watch the whole movie? What will make people say WOW? • The project can get the audiences’ attention as it introduces a gay relationship in a Romantic Thriller. As audiences tend to draw themselves towards thrillers and including a gay relationship will bring in a specific demographic since gays are slowly breaching media. So seeing it would be a good transitional step for gay characters to be in media. • The audience will question throughout the movie as we wonder why Greg (Dima’s character) is drawing himself closer to Luke. • The film will also feature an Arcade Fire soundtrack, which can draw in a crowd that is interested in the group to see the movie.

7. How would you get it out to the movie theaters? How will it be produced, distributed, and marketed? • It will be marketed to some company like Focus Features, as it is both a distributor and producer under NBCUniversal. As it is known for producing independent films which is what our movie is. It is not set out to be a blockbuster but may reach a niche audience. • If the film idea was pitched to Focus Features, we would address the pitch, if received well, we could start into pre-production. Beginning with casting and setting the storyboards. Then we can market the Arcade Fire soundtrack so it can be released before the movie so people who are interested in the group can gain interest in the movie. Market also by using movie posters featuring the main characters with the tagline: Keep Your Enemies closer or Keep Your Enemies at Watchful Eye. Being under a company that can produce, market, and distribute in nationwide movie theaters would prove to be an advantage.

8. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

9. At the beginning of the project, we were a bit shaky since when we were trying to cast our main characters. I did not know anybody around that would be able to possibly travel out to film. Sierra knew of her friend Ryan, who we would of had as our main character. Yet, he was not able to meet up. Then we decided to turn towards Remington’s friends, seeing as they were available at anytime. We decided to cast Remington’s friend, Dima, as Greg, Remington as Luke, and Remington’s girlfriend, Mariah, as Sabrina, Luke’s ex-girlfriend. • We began filming on Saturday March 12th and Sunday, March 13th , before Spring Break, for the major scenes. We did not film during spring break. We did film on both April 2ndand Remington filmed on a separate occasion, as Dima was not able to show up for the days of filming after spring break. We edited between March 14th-April 11th. • We had to improvise filming due to Dima’s absence, and I recommended creating a texting scene that would save film and look innovative in a modern movie like this. • The production overall was seamless, although rocky, we were able to work around the issues.

10. How did you integrate technologies software, hardware, and online in this project?

11. Our group used the editing software, Pinnacle Studio 17, to cobble our clips and edit them to turn into our movie opening. Taking advantage of the software, we learned how to create a split screen effect, figure with volume key framing, and create the improvised texting scene. • We used YouTube to find the music for the film. As YouTube holds many soundtracks that contain similar sounds. Finding the soundtracks from our movie influences and then finding the Arcade Fire music from the Her. Soundtrack. • I helped find links to show how to create a split screen effect and how to create a more effective texting scene. As I thought those links would give an advantage to how the film would look as a whole. • Here are the links: • http://www.pinnaclestudiopro.com/pinnacle-studio-effects/ • http://gizmodo.com/how-hollywood-figured-out-a-way-to-make-texting-in-movi-1623340285 • We used the computers our teacher provided in class so we could save our files onto the computer so we could integrate more clips into the film.