CCR: Question #3

     Since I'm combining both a talk show and an enhanced podcast for my first CCR, I'm going to do something on the simpler side for my second one, just so it's easier to understand and my point gets across quicker. Because of this, I'll be doing a presentation with a voiceover. Presentations don't exactly have scripts, so in this blog post I'll simply be answering the question that I will later break down on the presentation.

"How did your production skills develop through this project?"

    Through my project, I followed the natural progression of research --> plan --> production. I began by researching genre, media theories, title sequences, and openings that interest me in terms of inspiration. I was thinking of this project as simply another assignment. Something brainless and easy. Then, I started the planning for my opening, which included my plot idea, storyboard, characters, costumes, filming location, props, music and audio, and script. At this point, it was becoming more personal. I was starting to become proud of my product and gaining a sense of ownership for it. Last was producing my actual opening. I filmed, recorded, and created. It was such a creative journey that it felt liberating. The process was no longer a chore but a pleasure. I do have to admit, though, that I definitely had moments that felt weighing. For example, I had no costume until the day of filming, and I didn't even plan it myself. Solution? My costume for a school play just so happened to be perfect for my opening and came right in time for filming. Another instance was when I had to edit my entire opening THRICE because I kept losing or deleting it. Solution? I gave myself lots of time to do my editing, so though it was an unnecessary and time-consuming hassle, I managed to get it done in perfect time. A third occasion was that I am a huge procrastinator, and I worked on this project alone. This meant that I had to be solely dependent on myself for timing when it came to posting blogs and filming and editing. Solution? I had to learn and push myself throughout this project to get stuff done on my own terms and for my own success. This project has been a journey and a gift, and I have honed in on my editing, time management, and overall production skills through the course of it.

CCR: Question #2

 "How does your product engage with audiences, and how would it be distributed as a real media text?"

    Continuing the theme of the Puppies Talk podcast, the second question will be answered after the advertisement break, and it will likely be about some dog-related subject such as parks or treats. The following is the script for this section.

Ori: After that delicious snack, let's get back into it, shall we? So, Keyla, by making all these specific choices, you clearly had a target for your viewers, right?

Keyla: Of course, yes!

Ori: So tell me, who are these people you're trying to reach?

Keyla: The genres of psychological movies and dramatic movies are both largely viewed more by women than men because of the much heavier appeal emotionally. Men tend to be more drawn to the action, so women make up a grand part of my target audience. Additionally, psychological thrillers require a bit more intellect to grasp the concepts, so FTTRB targets adults around 18-35 more than older or younger ones.

Ori: Well, that's much simpler than I thought it was. Is the target audience based only on age and gender?

Keyla: Not exactly, Ori. It's also comprised of status, ethnicity, education, interests, and much much more. For example, my film should be especially attractive to viewers learning about medical and/or psychological topics like the ones Lily faces. Education in my target audience is also between mid to high since slight background knowledge is needed. However, status and ethnicity aren't big factors in my production's audience since this story doesn't even take place in present times, so both these characteristics were very different from then to now.

Ori: Ohhh, that makes sense! So what choices did you make when producing your movie to find said target audience?

Keyla: To begin, the main character is between her teenage to young adult years, which is why though the target audience is adults, those adults are on the younger side. Exanding on this, she's also a girl which will aid in the target audience for my genre to be even more drawn towards my film. Then, education is needed because Lily's story deals with lobotomies and the social norms of the 1800s. Knowing what's going on in the background is important in the film, which is why higher education audiences are ideal.

Ori: Wow, Keyla. So clever, truly. 

Keyla: You flatter me, Ori.

Ori: Tell me, how exactly do you plan to put this amazing film of yours out into the world?

Keyla: Let's be real here. This is the first production I'm ever putting out into the world; it's certainly not going to become famous overnight, and my budget is very, very limited. Hence, I need to start small when it comes to distributing it. There are annual film festivals held at a local high school in which I could submit my production to be displayed. There are often some pretty influential people who attend and I could get my film noticed big time! Also, online platforms are some of the easiest and most popular forms of distribution nowadays, all for a simple subscription. I could put my work on sites like Vimeo, YouTube, and Prime Video Direct. 

Ori: Sounds nice and realistic, Keyla. You seem to really have your stuff set. I wish you the best of luck in your journey, and can hopefully get you back on the podcast when you're famous! See you next episode on the Puppies Talk podcast! (Outro music)

Our host, Ori

Chocolate Covered Raisins

     I won't lie when I looked up what a CCR was before my teacher explained it to my class, the first thing that popped up was chocolate-covered raisins. Now that I'm well aware that CCR isn't some sweet snack but instead a Creative Critical Reflection, I'm going to be transitioning from my Portfolio Project to this analysis stage. Today, I'll be writing the script for Q1 of my CCR.

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

    To answer questions 1 and 2 of my CCR I wanted to do a podcast-style answer. My friends and I joke all the time that my living room seating looks like it was set up for a podcast so I'm going to take advantage of that. To tie in the creative aspect, I'll be having my dog be the interviewer because everybody else is busy and I'm working alone!

The idea:

The podcast setup inspiration:

My living room:

2 options: curtain down or curtain up

Ori (my dog): On today's episode of the Puppies Talk podcast, we're going to be interviewing the upcoming film director Keyla Seoane Vega! 

Keyla: Hey! It's my pleasure to sit here tonight.

Ori: Let's get into it. Tell us a little bit about your film why don't you?

Keyla: Of course, my film is the story of a girl who witnessed her own twin sister's suicide but because her PTSD was getting really bad, her family didn't want anyone to see her like that and got her lobotomized so she wouldn't remember. The entire movie is the progression of Lily, the main character, slowly finding out about her twin's death and going insane again.

Ori: Wow! How unexpectedly dark. So what's your genre then, horror?

Keyla: Nope it's a psychological drama and a period piece.

Ori: A period piece what is that? And a psychological drama? What are these? I thought there was only horror and comedy. Just how there are only two colors: blue and yellow.

Keyla: No silly there are tons of different genres each with their own conventions.

Ori: Okay, okay. Tell me about 'em.

Keyla: Well some major ones are dramas, thrillers, horrors, comedies, and coming-of-age films. They each have their own conventions or characteristics. For example, tone and mood. The tone and mood in each genre are how the connotations of the actions on screen make you feel. In horror, the tone would be suspenseful like in Terrifier while, on the other hand, the tone in comedy would be light-hearted like in Pitch-Perfect. Other conventions in each genre include topics, style, characters, plot structures, setting, conflict, speed in cuts, and endless more details.

Ori: Huh... Makes sense, I guess. Well, what genre convention did you choose, if any?

Keyla: My chosen convention was an unreliable narrator in a psychological drama genre. Unreliable narrators can be interpreted in many different ways, but Lily is one because she has a mental illness and memory loss. Her narration of the story can't be fully trusted because she doesn't have full knowledge of what's happening in her own narrative, so she isn't aware that she's an unreliable narrator.

Ori: So, you mentioned earlier how character can also make up conventions. How does the whole 'unreliable narrator' represent your main character, Lily?

Keyla: Great question, I see you're learning. Lily's story is a fictional representation of people with mental illness, more specifically, dissociative disorders like DID (dissociative identity disorder) and DA (dissociative amnesia). Mental illness is often represented incorrectly in movies and TV. While multiple symptoms are displayed in Lily, memory loss is a major theme in the movie, which I used construction to represent. Construction consists of visual and auditory choices to support aspects of a character. I used choices like vibrant lighting and curious music to build the idea that Lily's lack of knowledge and memory give her a child-like obliviousness. For example, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind deals with memory loss and has lots of flashbacks in which the construction helps display the main character's feeling in that moment.

Ori: Huh, it's cool how every element just sort of comes together in the end. You know what? All this technical talk is making me hungry.

Keyla: (throws treat) We'll be right back after a short break on the Puppies Talk podcast.

Here is where I would insert the ad, and after the ad, I would answer the 2nd question.

Post-Production! (Prequel)

     My first time editing this beautiful project, I didn't get very far. I hadn't edited since November and had grown unfamiliar with Premiere Pro since then. Because of this, I was very slow when editing, but also very nervous. Since I was so nervous and rushed I just completely forgot to save the entire thing. Don't get me wrong, even though I didn't get much done, I did the entire base of my opening. As in editing all the clips together to make 2 minutes.

Here, I pretty much had no editing plan and was just sticking clips together recklessly.

    

    

    The second time around, I had more of an idea of what I was doing and could also edit a lot faster. I not only edited the clips together but started working on motion. This meant I took into perspective if some clips were too shaky and needed to be stabilized and if some clips were too slow and should be sped up. I didn't know how to do any of this but by asking for help I found a couple students from my school's TV program that knew a whole lot more about editing. 

I never found out what happened to this draft and why it didn't save either, but I don't have it anymore.

    The third and last time, I edited all the way through. Before this, I finished all of my homework for every other class so that I could just focus on editing. Over two days, I spent 6 and 5 hours respectively editing my opening. And I couldn't be prouder of it. I've finished putting the clips together, color grading, adding music and foley, integrating the production company, and finding the perfect fonts for the credits and title. Only quickly, I mentioned foley, which I was supposed to make myself, but the grass sound I needed was not able to be made since it's been raining for the past few days and I can't use wet grass for any kind of crunch, so I stuck to royalty-free sound effects. However, I did record the pen click and rustling trees. Anyways, the editing this time was thorough and neat and even. Here are the time lapses for one of those days.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KL-BP94iMkVGs5cmSWsZbJaT_hEdozm8/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ONKPpTafKbdIVhAdikd6N35oEQhu04O_/view?usp=sharing

I edited the rest of it today, but this was only yesterday's editing.

“Birds Sound Effects | Mixkit.” Mixkit.co, 2025, mixkit.co/free-sound-effects/discover/birds/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2025.

“Grass Sound Effects | Mixkit.” Mixkit.co, 2025, mixkit.co/free-sound-effects/discover/grass/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2025.

Post-Production!

Lighting

    In my film, the goal was to integrate two different kinds of lighting. The beginning and end have high-key lighting while the scene where she finds the noose and the earring has low-key lighting. For the most part, the opening has bright, vibrant, high-key lighting to mimic a kid's mind. This is because her memory is limited, giving her a child-like whimsy. The scene would reflect this by the lighting and color being exaggeratedly vibrant and highlighter. In direct contrast, the later scene with the tree, the noose, and the earring had dim, dull, low-key lighting. The contrast was in the negatives and the temperature was set to cool. I edited my project in Premiere Pro with a set-up template for editing and simply switched the template to one for color. 

Editing Layout                                                             Color Layout

Settings for the high-key lighting clips

Before                                                             After

Settings for the low-key lighting clips

Before                                                                    After

Production Part 4

    Hey, Cambridge! It's a new week! Today's production is dialogue. As previously mentioned, my friend Margot has a lovely English accent and is going to be my voice-over actress. 

    Apart from being awesome, Margot spends the bulk of her time playing volleyball. This meant she had little to no time to meet up after school to record. Thankfully, we have theater class together every other day in which we have access to noise-cancelling recording rooms and microphones. So our solution? Record then.

    Though we had this class time to use, we still had to be responsible and participate in some part of it. For this reason, we cut our recording into three parts. One class is 90 minutes long which is three 30-minute blocks. For the first two thirty minutes, we worked and rehearsed; for the last thirty minutes, we worked on the voice-over. We did this three times to have a total of 90 minutes of work time.

Day 1:

• For about 10 minutes, we came up with this dynamic.
• For another 10 minutes, I explained the film and the opening plot. 
• For the last 10 minutes, she read the script and I explained the different decisions.

Margot reading the script.

Day 2:

• Read over the script and made different choices to see what sounded best
• Wrote down the different interpretations

Day 3:

• Recorded!
• I forgot that Lily's mom called her in for dinner in the opening and that I had to record that too.

 In the recording room.

Production Part 3

    Now into actual production. In the afternoon I discussed in my last post, I managed to finish filming everything except one scene. I still have to film voice-overs, but I did get foley done. My cameraman and I were initially going to record chronologically so we didn't miss any shots, but we ended up doing something more practical. We filmed based on location. See, even though we filmed in the same park, we wanted certain placement of trees and such for different scenes. For example, the big tree at the end of the opening couldn't be in any other scene because Lily isn't supposed to see it. 

    As mentioned before, I was using no sound from the original filming which means that my cameraman could talk to me and ask me questions as we were filming as well as tell me if there was anything to fix. I wouldn't exactly call them bloopers, but I'll be displaying lots of raw footage I filmed on my dad's NIKON 5000 camera to demonstrate the true trial-and-error when filming.

EX #1: Repetition

When trying to get the perfect opening shot, I knew what I was envisioning generally, but I was kind of uncomfortable with what to do as the actress. Thankfully, my cameraman was previously shown the 'vision' and we went through a process of repetition of the same scene until we found the right shot.

I still had two more options for the opening scene, but these caught more direction in the recording.

EX #2: Differences in Opinion

For this specific shot, I didn't have an exact approach in mind. After brainstorming for a minute, my cameraman and I each came up with different executions for this scene. I knew his would look too YouTube video-y but we filmed them both either way and ended up choosing the one we thought looked more professional and fitting.

We came to the conclusion that the one on the left (mine) displayed more knowledge of technique using the focus pull than the one on the right (his) which looked too amature for my portfolio project. To be fair, he's not in AICE Media Studies and I am. 

This last shot isn't an example of trial-and-error, but an example of true commitment. Viewers would never know, but I wanted a shot from straight above for this one and that obviously wasn't going to happen. Instead of flying, my cameraman climbed a tree that was quite literally falling apart and almost wrecked my dad's camera to get that angle for my opening. I am very grateful, but that man did not come out unscathed. Without further ado, the shot:

To quote him, "Anything for the shot!"