Creative Critical Reflection

-How does your project use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Our project mostly followed conventions rather than challenge them. We kept males in the ring rather than females. However we still did challenge some conventions, like the way we wanted to make the viewer feel. Rather than writing a sob story, we challenged conventions of the genre by writing a film that inspires and motivates the viewer.

By making Vincent and Booker come from low income areas we can show and teach the viewer that anything is possible no matter the obstacle. Our project DID represent social groups. Our main character Vincent Montoya, as well as his opponent, Booker Cannon, both play minorities. Hispanics from a low income area. They are both fighting for the same cause: to support themselves and be able to provide themselves a better life. Although our characters do represent a specific race their story is what becomes relatable to any viewer.

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

Our product engages with the audience by following characters through the fight, seeing the fight as if they were in it as opposed to seeing it as a spectator. Giving the audience this point of view brings them closer to the characters, allowing them to see every punch more closeup and overall providing a more exciting viewing experience. We were also able to engage our audience by making relatable characters who can prove that they can succeed. Today there is an abundance of ways to distribute video content so it is important to choose where you want to distribute it wisely. On a larger scale, I would first look into distributing the film in theatres, and later distributing it on streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu. Having been almost 20 years since the DVD was created, I have decided to rule that out of my distribution methods considering a large portion of the world population has moved on to newer ways of watching movies. Since we do not know anybody in the film industry, we would approach small scale distribution by using platforms that we have access to, and that other people including our peers have access to. Submitting our film to local and state film festivals would be an ideal way to get our movie out there. Distributing it on sites like Vimeo and Youtube, as well as social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

-How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

After an entire day of production I can definitely say that I learned an abundance of new things from this. Throughout the making of the film I saw my skills and my entire groups skills improve in regards to planning and keeping a production going. Having had a role in every part of the film’s making, I gained skills and knowledge in planning, storyboarding, scriptwriting, cinematography, directing, and editing. We were able to wrap production in just 24 hours, however those 24 hours were a rollercoaster.

We shot our production out of order, meaning we shot our hospital scene before we shot the fight scene. For our hospital scene we had access to a Trauma room at a nearby hospital from Rafa’s dad, who is a trauma surgeon. We shot the scene at 3:00 A.M. after waiting an hour and a half to shoot. One thing that was made clear to me during that part of production was that a lot of waiting has to take place while shooting on set or on location. And this applied to all of production Whether it be a patient in the trauma room, the makeup people working on the actors, waiting for the rain to die down, trying to get our lights to work, we spent about half of the time waiting to shoot. We were able to wrap the hospital scene in 3 takes, having left at around 3:30

The next part of our production was our fight scene. We started production at around 8:00 PM. At around 8:30 we got shut down by security at Markham Park, who told us the park was closed and that we had to leave. Poor planning on our end. On our way out of the park it started pouring and I had to text everybody helping out that we would have to cancel. About an hour later we got back together, called all of our extras back and shot the fight scene at our friend Armando’s house. During the shoot it started to drizzle again, however we kept going with the shoot. I learned that a crew with more than one person is very useful as we were all multitasking to get a shot (Arianna held an umbrella, I held a bag over my camera as I was filming, and Chris held the light to move it around while filming). For my first time being on set, this night of production felt like a rollercoaster, but it was also a huge learning experience

Having shot the entire film, I learned as a cinematographer to control the camera better, tracking subjects better, and working with different frame rates to make editing easier. I shot the hospital scene at 24 frames per second, but I shot the fight scene at 60 frames per second to be able to speed up/slow down shots to make it look more realistic/dramatic. For this production I used my Canon 7D Mark 2 with a DJI Ronin for Stabilization.

I definitely saw my entire process of production as a learning experience. I learned something new in every aspect of filmmaking throughout the making of this opening and they are things that I will definitely apply to the work I do in the future.

-How did you integrate technologies-Software, hardware and online- in this project?

As far as softwares go, my group used Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2019 and Adobe After Effects to edit CHAMPION. The fight and hospital sequences were put together and color corrected on Adobe Premiere. Graphics by Arianna were made on Adobe After Effects. All sound mixing was done on Adobe Premiere by me.   A huge part of our film was reliant on sound to establish and help further tell our story, for audio we used a Rode Shotgun microphone to record natural sound during each shoot (Hospital and Fight scene) as well as to record all Foley sound. For our camera we used a Canon 7D Mark 2, mounted on to a DJI Ronin-S for stabilization. I also used a Feelworld 4k camera monitor.

NOW IN VIDEO FORM: