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!