The big reveal! (It's finally over!)

 Alright it's time! Here are the links to everything from the project!

Instagram (Social Media):

https://www.instagram.com/sessiononeshortfilm

Short Film:

https://youtu.be/pgJe_8TbVNA?si=h9z21BMpHHEJmm7W

Backup files for film and social media & Postcard (Print Component):

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PiTy_W1ICFeU-1XIC7WrvPhf1-jvGVTX?usp=sharing

Critical Reflection

The short film Session One works to tell how actions have consequences, but it can always get better with help. Utilizing both the present tense and flashbacks, Session One shows how your own behavior will not only affect yourself but those around you, and it is never too late to seek help or guidance.

While planning for Session One, the original focus was on branding. In this, much inspiration was taken from the heavy brand identity of Two Distant Strangers. A big part of this brand was shown through their social media pages, specifically Instagram, with a very consistent color scheme and overall look. This was taken into account while creating the social media page for Session One. Considering how engaging the Instagram of Two Distant Strangers was, the goal would be the same for Session One. Now considering how to aim this at a specific target audience, it had to be decided what the exact target audience for this film would be. To do this, the genre also had to be more established than previously.

Session One was decided to be a Drama short film, so to help further the use of genre conventions inspiration was taken from Dead Poets Society. While the film could be considered both coming of age and drama, the research had to be focused specifically on the drama side of it. Session One has a few plot points that should be approached in a similar way to the major ones in Dead Poets Society, so it while analyzing the filming techniques, the script and acting also had to be considered. This is where some of the inspiration for Session One took place, the script called for a therapist character, but the way it was written was in a much more friendly mentor-like way than just a regular therapist. While researching the film Whiplash was also considered to help further the plot, and the contrast of these two films helped provide Session One with different routes to take to get the same result.

So, considering all of this, the target audience for Session One is definitely teenagers who enjoy drama films. The whole film surrounds a highschooler, so it would obviously lean towards the younger crowd, but they would still need to be mature enough to handle the topics. That being said, the digital component for Session One was purposely on Instagram since it is a popular app used by teenagers, and younger individuals are less likely to run into the film than if the social media of choice were to be TikTok, for example.

For the print component, the post card was made to be easy to look at but still provide the important information for the "film festival" that Session One would be screening at. While there was the option to put even more text than we had, multiple studies have found that Generation Z has shorter attention spans than previous generations, and it would be a better idea to only include crucial information to view the film and major credits of the film to not bombard the target audience with more information than necessary.

Now back to brand identity, the goal for Session One's branding was to be very defined, yet welcoming and recognizable. All three components of Session One kept a consistent color scheme and 'aura' graphics to establish a consistent theme that would be communicated no matter where an individual would first hear of the film. The space where this was most prominent was the social media, as there was the most opportunity to showcase this branding through a multitude of different posts.

One this that was notably different in the film component, though, was a different text was used for the credits and the title. This was out of the control of the editor, as the font used previously on the social media posts and post card was not available on the editing software used. This could have been avoided, though, by cross checking before any definitive branding was done, but unfortunately that had not been considered until after the fact.

The color scheme was also a bit messy towards the beginning of production, the reasoning for this was because for each 'meet the cast and crew' post, it was decided there would be a different color. Each character has an assigned color, but because the first two were crew posts, those colors never came back up prominently in the branding at all.

The film itself did a good job at showing the how people as young as teenagers can struggle. A common misconception is that because teens are young, they haven't had enough experience to actually struggle with any mental health issues yet. This simply isn't the case, and one of the goals of Session One was to show that it can really happen. The main character, Cameron Martinez, struggles with depression after her sister ran away from home, since she blames herself. Obviously, that is a very specific situation with a heavy weight for an individual to carry, but depression can come from anything, and the goal of the film isn't to say it needs to be from something so terrible, but to show how it's ok to get help.

While it isn't outright said in the production that if you struggle with any sort of mental health issue you can always seek help, there is a prominent quote that led to the title of the film "This is only session one." That quote means a multitude of things, but the number one is that healing takes time. The film isn't only to say that if you struggle, going to therapy will help you, but it is also saying that there is no immediate fix and sometimes you need to just live through it, because it slowly gets better. That's why the film does a good job at representing this issue, it doesn't pretend that there is an easy solution, it acknowledges that it is difficult, but no matter what it is still possible.

We did it!

 WOW! I can't believe we really did it! Even though me and Mariana had some moments where we were pretty doubtful, in the end, we got it all done! I'm very proud of the both of us, but I also want to take a moment to consider things that I wish went differently, or things I think we did particularly well!

First of all, I think with the time we had to pull the film itself together after all of the issues we ran into, it went pretty well! That being said, we had less time to properly plan each filming day with our actors, so some of the scenes, depending on when they were filmed, was very rushed. Mariana was in charge of editing this, though, and I think she did a relatively good job of covering up the fact that some of it was rushed.

This did mess me up for social media, though, since I intended on having dedicated time for taking promotion photos and all of this time had to be spent on the actual film instead. I don't think that we should've rushed the filming process even more by making more time for me to make social media posts, since the film is what I'm promoting in the first place, so obviously we need a good film to promote! I just wish that we had more time to take these photos. That being said, I actually think I did a good job with the photos I had. For some of them, I had to take screenshots of the footage to get our promo photos. I think these turned out pretty good though! Especially considering what I had to work with.

But what I didn't like about my social media, and I wish I did differently...is also kind of a result of this. I felt like a lot of my posting has been rushed, and there is still some more to go, which will probably have the same issue. I am a busy person, but I still had a scheduling app that would notify me when to post, and I made a good amount of the posts more than a night before each day I would be posting them, unless I had some last-minute good ideas to add to that day's schedule. I would end up posting multiple times a day, when I had more than 25 days to post, so if everything were to be filmed on time, I definitely would have only had to stick to one post at a time.

Now moving a bit more backwards to the project planning period, there was nothing I really regret from this. Me and Mariana got the ball rolling pretty quickly and I think our issues only really started when we were having problems with our actors. Obviously, we couldn't have predicted that these issues would show up but it still would have been nice if we planned some backups or ways to work around them, but they got to a point where they truthfully would have just been unavoidable.

Well, FINALLY!

 WE DID IT!!! Well- not actually did everything, but the hardest part is over. We have officially filmed EVERYTHING! I feel as though we are very behind with this which worries me, but luckily all of my CCR research and planning had been done during our limbo week where we couldn't get anything done due to our casting issues. So now, let's recap everything we did this week since my last blog post!

On Thursday, we invited over a few extras to do our party scene, and we got a lot of footage done then. The most filming we did was on Saturday, though, since we re-filmed and finished all of the therapist office footage, which is sort of the 'meat' of the film. During all of this, I again was making a ton of social media posts. I'm most excited about the character poster one I had made on Thursday, I feel like it does a great job at promoting the film.

I also worked a lot on finishing the meet the cast posts, and scheduling all of the future posts, so you will be seeing a lot of that in the future! I'm so excited to share more of my work, and all of the troubles me and Mariana had with our casting and filming schedule paid off. Although this wasn't the ideal situation we are still getting it done!

Mariana also did the post card, and I added a bit of extra touches, like a QR code to our social media in the empty spaces that looked a bit awkward on its own.

Again, the bulk of what I did is social media related, but it has been a crazy amount of simultaneous work when it came to filming days. On Saturday it was the hardest, because we filmed one scene where Mariana couldn't film so I had to do that instead of making any social media posts of BTS content, which was slightly annoying since there were some great opportunities there. Then, since all of the filming was done at my house, I also had to help adjust the lighting and set as we went on filming to help portray different locations. Since I had just moved, it was very difficult to locate everything we would need for this film and I was glad to see we could get it done.

Even though everything felt last minute, we got it all done! Now Mariana is handling editing while I continue the long process of making even more social media posts until the project is finished. But for now, that's a wrap!

Ready, and FILM! FILM! FILM!

 Hello! Today was....LONG. Starting off my morning with the SAT was not on my bucket list for a day that I knew was also full of filming, but we do what we have to do! This begins the marathon of me and Mariana's filming, since we are definitely behind. Since my main job is maintaining the social media, I have to make sure to record as much BTS content as possible these next few days!

So today we filmed the scene where Cameron comes home from the party and gets confronted by her mother. Also, maybe I forgot to mention but the gender of Cameron had to be swapped due to our issues with our lead actors dropping, so we had to swap a bit of the casting around. This honestly wasn't a huge deal since the name Cameron isn't heavily associated with any gender, so we didn't have to change much of the script.

Now Mariana is playing Sarah, which sort of helps us out because she had to be present for any of the filming either way, so we don't need to work around even more people's schedules.

While we filmed these parts, I also simultaneously made Instagram posts for every single thing we had done. Today, I made more of the meet the cast posters, and behind the scenes posts, both reels and images. Something I did was take a ton of pictures of the filming process as we went because I noticed a lot of other groups just made some behind the scenes 'dumps' where they got to show a bunch of random photos from the filming process. Again, a big thing for me is keeping our digital presence sort of 'real' and welcoming, so I thought this would be a great addition to our Instagram page! That's all for now, update when we finish filming everything!