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.