Creative Critical Reflection

Final products!

Excerpt:

Poster:

Website
https://jennyg0505.wixsite.com/expressionmovie

Sewing my poster together

After mulling, debating, contemplating, and wallowing, I finally decided on the title for my film: Made In Expression. It’s probably not the best title in my mind’s galaxy of ideas, but considering I have to keep going with this whole process it will certainly do. Plus, it inspired an idea for the poster: a close up of a of a shirt and its tag, with the tag reading the title of the film (to accentuate the play on words with “MADE FROM CHINA”). I decided to have it be the front of a shirt, rather than a clothes hanger, but other than that the idea is generally the same.

Title blues

Before I can start working on the website for my film, I have to first create the poster so that I can use its visuals to lay out the site. I also decided to finish the poster and site for the most part before I finish up editing: I’ve cut and gone through enough footage to understand the basic outline of the premise and what I should be focusing on when marketing the production. In addition, the editing comes easy to me - I generally don’t stress over doing it or lack ideas/motivation with it. For this reason, I want to save it for last, knowing that I’ll be able to get it done no matter what, rather than save the “harder” portion for the end and risk cramming. Sort of like saving the best for last.

While starting on my poster, I realized that if I’m going to create a minimalist poster - it’s nearly impossible to do so without having a title. Here’s the basic structure that I came up with so far, just for an idea:

It’s obviously very basic and not even close to filled in, but that’s what I’m going for when I say minimalistic; and you can see how empty it is without a title. Granted, I am terrible at coming up with titles, and have been putting off this stage quite frankly. To come up with some ideas, I went to IMDB.com and scrolled through the “Genre: Documentary” portion to come up with some ideas. So far, I came up with:

• Clothing: Made In Expression (inspired by O.J.: Made In America)
• Made In Expression (also inspired by O.J., as well as a play on “MADE IN CHINA” on clothing tags)
• Expression (minimal title, inspired by films such as 13th and Dancer)
• Appearance (minimal)
• Eccentric Expression (alliteration, because why not)
• Artificial Appearances (alliteration)

I’ll probably end up trying out all of these titles, as well as any others that I come up with, on the poster and choosing whichever seems to fit best.

Essence in minimal content

In addition to working on my website as well as editing, I also can’t dare forget about the movie poster. Without a doubt, the most successful movie poster for this film would be something minimalistic. The first reason being that the overall documentary (including the three parts, not just the part that my excerpt is included in) cover very broad topics, information and themes, and so it would be harder to come up with something more holistic and intricate that covers all three sections. What would be easier is coming up with a single item (my original idea for the time being is a clothes hanger) that simplistically sums up the content of all three sections of the documentary; and I feel that minimalism is the best way to go for this.

The second reason is the target audience that I’m appealing to: a common trend online is the creation of minimalistic movie posters for films that already exist. Here are some examples:

What this trend shows is that my target audience - younger individuals, within the Gen Z and Millenial age range - are interested in this style of minimalism; so into it that they are eager to go out of their way to create this style themselves.

My original plan now, for the time being, is to create a movie poster that echoes this style of minimalism using the single object of a clothes hanger. Throughout the process of creating my poster, this may change, but for now I’m sticking to it. I’ll use Photoshop to create it, since I have a general knowledge of how to use it and some experience with creating products from it.

Capitalist scheme or empowerment genius?

I wasn’t in the right mindset to edit today, so instead I decided to start working on my film’s website. I chose wix as my website-building platform because, out of my past experience, it has the simplest/most effective interface and the most potential to create an immersive site that best enraptures visitors into the world of my story.

While perusing the default options for wix, its suggestions struck me with a brilliant idea: clothing merchandise! We see this marketing scheme extremely often with bands and musical artists; when you're at a concert or on a band's/artist's website, there is always advertising for the musicians' clothing items that syncs up to the brand they're presenting. So, if my brand for my film is all about clothing, and introducing/wearing clothing that's nonconforming and unconventional: why not offer that for people myself?

Unfortunately, I know absolutely nothing about clothing design, so I have two options: 1) wing it, probably not the best option; 2) briefly research it myself; or 3) talk to someone that has background knowledge in fashion/clothing design to help me out, but I probably don't have enough time to do this. For now, I'm going to finish constructing the basic outline of my website, and use the blanks that present themselves to me to devise the route I'm going to take when designing the clothing.

Composing a plan for tunes

While going through my stock footage, I found some really good stuff in the ones that were "ruined" by the music playing in the background (mentioned in my filming post). However, there was something about one of the songs - titled "tbh ily' by Chet Porter - that seemed to fit so perfectly with the unfolding scene, that I made a split second decision in that moment to contact the managers of Porter to ask for permission to use the song in the excerpt. To my surprise - they got back to me very quickly, granting me permission! (Click on screenshot to enlarge).

















I don't know what I'll be doing for music throughout the entire excerpt for now as far as music goes, but it does set me at ease to know I have a fantastic instrumental to use - and knowing I don't necessarily have to mute the portions that contain the song.