Final Portfolio Project

 After months of work here is our final portfolio project! I am so proud of how everything turned out, and how far my group has come not only as filmmakers, but as people. 

Here is a google drive link containing all three parts of the portfolio:

W!TCH!

A video of the social media page and each individual post is available on the drive, but if for some reason it is not working, here is the link to our official instagram page:

WITCH! Instagram

Collaborators: Nicolas Restrepo, Zachary London, Samuel Perez

Critical Reflection

 W!TCH! is a coming of age film following Claire, a girl willing to go to great lengths to fit in, as well as reconnect with her ex-best friend Sarina.

However, this was not the original plan. Back when we first started the portfolio project, we had a very different idea. We wanted to make an experimental film that played with the idea of fourth wall breaks, following a character who slowly falls in love with the camera. But after group meetings we realized the idea was a bit too out there and we didn’t have enough time to fully develop it. So, we decided to switch gears. The very first day we were assigned the portfolio project, Samuel and I were coming up with a pitch for our group, when we came up with the idea for a supernatural film that blends with a typical teen dramedy. Our specific pitch was “Mean girls meets The Craft.” What we thought was a throwaway idea ended up being what we kept coming back to, and eventually decided on. We knew we wanted to still utilize fourth wall breaks, and thankfully had already done plenty of research,

In the television show Fleabag, the protagonist frequently breaks the fourth wall, giving the viewers internal thoughts and exposition. In many productions, fourth wall breaks are used solely for comedic effect (think, The Office)

but in Fleabag they are also used to create intimacy, a space where Fleabag herself can tell the audience her feelings, and truly show the “real her.” 

Since Claire in W!TCH! is a shy teen with no friends, we wanted to utilize fourth wall break in similar ways. Engaging audiences, by bringing them face-to-face with Claire speaking about her desires, insecurities, and motives. 

When moving into the teen coming of age/dramedy genre we knew we needed to do more research to properly hit (or challenge) genre conventions. 

Mean Girls (2004) was a huge inspiration for W!TCH!

Cady Heron was an inspiration for Claire’s character, particularly how quickly she trusts the “Plastics” and how she finds herself wanting to be friends with them, despite their mean reputation. Gretchen was also an inspiration for Sabrina’s character, a girl who just wants to fit in and is willing to do anything to please the group leader. While comedic and at times downright ridiculous, at its core Mean Girls is a story about friendship, insecurity, and the desire to fit in, which is what we wanted to achieve with W!TCH!

However, a way we did challenge conventions was with our “void” scenes.

(Claire in the "Void")

The fourth wall breaks in the void represent Claire’s internal thoughts, as she’s quite literally in her own head. While Mean Girls had a few fourth wall breaks, it was filmed in almost an interview format, as characters told audiences what they knew about Regina George, showcasing her popularity. In W!TCH! the only person who talks directly to the camera is Claire, something not typically done in a teen movie.

As a short film W!TCH targets a majorly female audience, as the film is about the female high school experience. W!TCH will mainly promote to a teenage/young adult audience as they are the age where they are currently going through/or recently went through similar experiences.

However, there will also be promotion to females of all ages, as at one point or another every girl has gone through a close experience, whether it be a struggle to make friends, or a friendship break up. 

One way we attempted to promote the film to different age groups was through our social media. We made a few posts with the concept of, If you liked __ movie, you should watch W!TCH! A way to show audiences similar movies to our film, and encourage them to watch it. We chose 3 films from 3 different decades, as a way to try to market to different age groups. 

Regarding Representation, there are many groups W!TCH strives to accurately represent. The first being actual witches. After having a meeting with our teacher regarding our progress with our project she brought it up to our attention and made a valid point that we needed to research witchcraft before continuing our script, to ensure that we were writing about it respectfully and accurately. After that meeting we did heavy research before writing the big seance scene.

While learning about different rituals and spells, we settled on doing a tarot card reading, as it wouldn’t be very hard to film and the script could be easily customizable depending on what cards we used. We got a tarot deck and learned the meaning of each card before writing the script for the scene, ensuring that what Andre was saying was actually accurate. 

Next, and a bit more broad was the representation of girls in general. As our writer is a boy, he made sure to ask around to learn about different girls' experiences regarding friendship/insecurity/and the want to be well liked. After gathering enough knowledge he wrote the script as a culmination of everything he learned. 

The brand curated for the production had two major goals: to engage the target audience, and to be representative of the film. Before making any posts we planned out a color scheme, and key brand symbols. For colors we landed on deep jewel tones, mainly wine red/burgundy, similar to the clothing the “witch” group wore in the film. We knew that we wanted to use key brand symbols to keep the logo, postcard, and social media posts consistent. After some brainstorming we settled on tarot cards as they are an important symbol in witchcraft and in the film. 

For our social media page we utilized Instagram, as we could post both videos (or “reels”), and images. Additionally, with our target audience and demographic, it is a very popular app that most people already have downloaded. 

We decided to format the posts like tarot cards, and after trial and error we found a shape and design that we liked. We scanned actual tarot cards to use as the background for the posts to keep them as realistic as possible. Additionally, almost every post had images of stars on them, to make the posts a bit more visually interesting and callback to the astrological nature of the tarot cards. Once we created our post “format” it made branding a lot easier, and our instagram looked very consistent. As for the type of posts, we made more serious posts like crew introductions and cast introductions, as well as more engaging posts like exclusive behind the scenes content, and funny and relatable instagram reels. 

As for the postcard, we had it match our instagram, utilizing the same wine red, fonts, and tarot card background. 

Overall, I am very happy with our final product. However, If I could go back in time I would love to add more actual witchcraft to the film to show the extent of what the girls get up to. I think the witchiness of our film was slightly lacking as it wasnt present at all until the tarot card scene. Maybe audiences could have seen the group practicing witchcraft before Claire found out, to create suspense for the viewers.

 

That’s all for my critical reflection, stay tuned for the final product!

an update (editing, social media)

 Today Samuel, Zach, and I met up at Samuel's house to edit. We edited together the opening scene of the film, as well as void scenes, and the tarot card reading. For now we just have a line edit, but we are also keeping sound design in mind and writing down what we need for each scene. 

a brief lunch break 

a still from the tarot card reading scene

Then, after editing for a few hours, we switched our focus over to social media, where we worked on some posts to upload. We decided to do a behind the scenes of our day 3 of production, and a reel. For the reel, we decided to do a silly behind the scenes, to show our audience how we achieved one of our shots. 

This is what we came up with:

That's all for this blog! Stay tuned for more.

Group Meeting

 Hi Blog! Today in class we had our second group meeting regarding our portfolio project. In these meetings we are put into groups with members of other portfolio project groups to share our progress and ask for/give advice and suggestions. My group today consisted of Emi, Adriana, Victoria, Audrey, Samara, and I. Here are my notes from the meeting:

Aneesa Bajaj

• producer/ art director 

• More planning and pre-production

• On the second day of filming 

• Their set up consists of a black background set up 

• Headshots on social media 

• Intro to characters on social media (tarot cards)

• They have a handful of posts scheduled to come out every day this week

• They are filming today after school( montage scene“ dead wife”) 

• The film is called “Witch!”

• Dark color scheme ( pay homage to mean girls poster)

Emi Valdivia 

• Art director/ producer 

• They only need to shoot 3 more scenes (out of 7)

• They started filming last week Tuesday 

• They focused on Andrews scenes Saturday 

• Emi is the social media manager

• The film is called “The Scourge”

• Making two postcards ( one is inspired by the tarot card that is given to a character in the film) 

Adriana Vega

• They are finishing filming today

• They are behind on social media 

• They filmed in the everglades + took photos for the instagram

• Filmed called “ One Flip Away”

• Postcard in Progress (plan to finish today)

• Planning to start editing ASAP after filming is done

• Plan to film interviews with cast/crew for instagram reels

Victoria Duque 

•  Finalized filming yesterday 

• The short film is mostly shot in main characters rooms 

• Showed the difference between day time and night time 

• Not started the postcard yet (ASAP)

• Filmed three reels for social media 

• Did a photoshoot for the postcards 

• Filmed called “ Sprouting” 

Audrey Pangalangan

• Working on social media 

• Adjusted cast/crew 

• Auras represent different personalities for meet the cast & crew on social media 

• Taking character photos (ASAP) 

• Filmed in called “ Session One” 

• They decided to not write in a death since its difficult to portray that in the right way 

• Majority of the filming is happening at her house 

• They haven't filmed yet (will start this Wednesday)

Samara Hernandez 

• Is doing a documentary

• ^ about latin american culture in society (This episode is about dance & music)

• She filmed before spring break and during spring break 

- Initially 4 interviews but ended up with 3 due to conflicts

    -grandma, dad, dancer

- 5 posts up so far on social media, bright color scheme to represent the different latin american flags

Overall, the team meeting was very helpful and I'm glad I got to here everyone out and give advice and suggestions

that will hopefully help their project!

My cutie group!

That's all for this blog! Until next time... :)

That's a wrap! (Filming day 3)

 We are officially done filming! Nico and I started out by shooting the flashback montage scene. We wanted to give it that traditional "dead wife montage" feel so we shot everything with an old digital camera I inherited from my parents. (a 2008 canon powershot) 

For being made the year I was born and being almost 18 years old, the camera held up pretty well and gave us the vintage quality we wanted. We shot various scenes around a local plaza for about an hour before heading to Samuel's house for the rest of the shoot. After editing it together I'm proud of it, and I think it fit our vision.

The final "dead wife" montage 

Once getting to Samuel's house we hit a bit of a roadblock because it was about 5pm and still light outside, and the film we were shooting took place at night. So.. Nico and I bought some trash bags at the grocery store and brought them to Sam's. As a group, and even with the help of our actors, we blacked out the living room windows by taping trash bags to them and then closing the blinds. 

Then, for the tarot reading scene, we made the lighting more creative and dark to mark a shift in the story.

Samuel's dog 'bono' in our witchy lighting

A still from the tarot scene

Overall, this was a very long (3pm-10pm) but successful filming day, and we are wrapped! Yay!!!

That's all for this blog, stay tuned for more :)

Production Day 2

 Hi blog, we just wrapped up our second day of shooting!

Today we filmed all the scenes set in "the void" as well as the new opening scene, and the scene where Claire arrives to Andre's house. I'm sure you're confused, because the script has changed so much, but fear not,

here is the final script:

SCRIPT

It was finally completed on Saturday, and we are all happy with the result.

Personally, I think filming went very well, we did go a bit over the time we set to film, but we completed everything we scheduled, which made it worth it. 

We started off by setting up "the void," which was made possible by using a large black backdrop Samuel's dad already owned. (He's a photographer!) 

We did get a little bit behind schedule because we had to pick it up from Samuel's dad's friends house, but it was only a 15 minute drive so it wasn't anything too severe. 

Thankfully we already knew how to set up the backdrop and lighting because we have already used it for a film that required a similar "void" 

BTS pictures of a previous film Samuel, Nico, and I have worked on

Filming the void scenes went very well, Claire is an incredible actress and takes direction very very well. If we give her a note she immediately takes it and fixes what she was doing. Zach is a great director with a clear vision, and he works well with Samuel to get dynamic and interesting shots.

We also filmed a few shorter scenes, like the new opening scene which takes place in Claire's bedroom as she gets ready for school. We filmed in Samuel's sisters room and set up the desk to look more like a vanity. 

We decided to add this scene to the script because we didn't love our previous opening scene after we filmed it. As a group we thought it through the viewers into the story too fast. Our new opening has a bit more exposition and helps viewers understand Claire's character a bit more. 

We also filmed the short scene where Claire arrives to Andre's house, as the sun was setting, which gave good lighting and made it accurate to the script. 

Overall, filming day 2 was very productive, and when we finished I made a post for our social media to keep followers updated and give exclusive BTS content!

Watch W!TCH

 Helloooo blog

It's influencer time!

Or...

more like niche micro filmmaker influencer time 😝

SO!

Social media yayyyy

Step 1 was finding a good username. Our film title "W!TCH" made this a bit hard, since you can't add special characters to usernames on instagrams. After some brainstorming we decided to abbreviate our title to wtch, just for the username. 

We settled on the username watch.wtch because the alliteration is catchy and it gives a good slogan. 

For our first few posts we are doing crew intros and bios. Making a template for our posts took some time, we didn't know exactly what theme or imagery we wanted, we just knew we wanted to use deep jewel tones

social media color scheme

As Nico and I played around with ideas, we had the amazing idea to do tarot cards! Tarot cards are an important image in our film, and can be customized easily. 

We did the front of the tarot card with a picture of the person, and the back with a short bio of them. They will be posted together to give followers a brief intro of our crew. 

Here is an example of one of the posts:

The posts were made on Canva. We started by just using the line tool to form a rectangle (the outline of the card) Then we changed the background color to a deep purple to match our proposed color scheme. The I found some tarot card backgrounds on google, imported them in, and changed the color to a purple to match the background

Original tarot card backgrounds

Then I imported pictures of each member of the crew, removed the background, and put them into the tarot card. God bless Canva Premium! While I was working on the front, Nico was working on the back, which I think turned out great! He also found the fonts we used which I think match the witchy, tarot card aesthetic. 

We finished the posts by adding some final details like the stars in the background.

That's all for this post. Call me a graphic designer because for never doing anything like this, I'm very proud of myself 😸