Reflection

This is it! My group and I put a lot of time and effort into this film opening and I made an overview of the what we went through to be able to reach the final product. I will post the film later today, stay tuned. Thank you for following me on this journey. I hope you guys enjoy the film and the review please leave some feedback of what you think.

  CCR Typed

Hi guys my name is artur diniz santos and i was i a group that worked together to create the film opening: Footsteps. I worked alongside Diogenes Mezzadra and Alejandro Caranque, to create a thrilling film. We began 7 weeks ago when our group first met up to decide what our film opening was going to be about. We had a vague idea that we wanted to do something that related to a war veteran who suffers from a severe case of PTSD. After deciding on our idea we did a lot of research on not only PTSD but veterans who suffered from it after a war. After countless of hours of research we finally got a better idea of how to portray the symptoms of PTSD. When we had made our decision final on what we wanted to create we had to come up with ways to portray all of our research into this film. We met up again a week later and created some scenarios that we thought we good, we had decided on doing a flashback of the veteran at the war from the very moment where it now triggers his PTSD, however our teacher gave us some time in class to have a peer review session and the group i was in gave us some more ideas which we thought were good and we had changed to one of their ideas but we went back to our original idea as we believed that we had a better idea on how to create a more powerful scene.

A typical genre convention of a thriller is the sense of anxiety. In our film we tried to create some stress on the audience by leaving them on the edge of their seats trying to figure out what is going to happen next. In the beginning of the film opening our main character, lieutenant Harvey, was disengaged with the audience. He showed very few signs of life based off of the way he was looking around the place and how he had his head down a majority of the time. With this “dead look” the audience begins to feel sorry for him and therefore creates a connection with him. One way that we challenged the conventions of a thriller is that we decided to use natural colors rather than using the typical dark colors and shades. We believed that one way that we would be able to stand out was if we were able to challenge the typical ideas, therefore we used the natural colors. We thought that the film would be better if we used as much light as possible and use the natural sunlight. Our film opening represents a lot of issues that the world faces today in the sense of PTSD. Thousands of people across the world suffer from PTSD not only from wars but also from everyday things. We hope that our film not only entertains the audience but also raise awareness to the issue of PTSD and what people have to go through.

Many people can relate to this film opening as they could have family and/or friends who suffer from PTSD. We believe that this film engages with our audience as PTSD is a common disorder within families. The film can relate to these people who know of someone who suffers from PTSD as they will know some of the symptoms as well as be able to know what he is going through. We created this film to be a serious topic and hope that it would be shared across multiple media platforms such as social media and local theaters. The issue of PTSD is very common and we hope that since it is common it entices people to want to watch it and learn a little bit more about it while entertaining themselves. We hope that the audience become attached to Lieutenant Harvey and are able to sympathize for him and see how serious and real this issue is.

I feel as if not only my production skills improved but my entire group as well. Throughout the entire project we used the different angles and camera shots and did some extra research on camera shots to be able to use them properly in our film. In the beginning of our film we started out with me being the main actor and Diogenes was going to film however it did not work out so well, so Alejandro thought it was a better idea if we switched roles. We believe that this improved our film a lot. I believe that the more you practice something the better you get so by just being able to use what we researched into practice improved our abilities. We went through multiple takes and drafts which each time improved our skills a little more than the last.

The use of technology played a pivotal role in our film opening. As I mentioned in one of my blog posts we used a camera that my dad allowed me to borrow which i feel helped improve the quality of the film. Alejandro was the editor of our film and he decided to use the website Wevideo.com to be able to edit it.The technology played a crucial role on the quality of production.