Poster Struggles Part 2

Hello!

Who knew making a film poster would be this rough? Not me! I of course suspected it would not be easy but life got in the way again and made it harder for Chey and I. After settling on one idea, we decided to do a large Z filled with words.

However, that was a lot more challenging to make then first meets the eye. First of all, neither of us knew how to make it. When I first searched on Google, the only way I could find to make it was with Photoshop or an Adobe program. Well, neither of us have Photoshop so that wasn't going to happen. Chey took the reins while I continued creating our website (more on that in the next post).  By some miracle, she accidentally figured out how to do it. Hallelujah!

Then came time to format the actual poster. We decided to use Canva because it gives us a lot of options to work with and it's relatively accessible. I had to look at some other movie posters to help me figure out where to put what. I also had to create a free trial in order to upload the SteelTongs font. I learned that that's the font of the credits at the bottom of a movie poster. I got some inspiration from the That Awkward Moment movie poster. We liked the way they used two different colors of text for part of their title and other information, such as: the date and website.

One of the hardest parts in making our poster was probably figuring out the font we wanted to use for the subtitle. Oh my goodness! I don't think I told you guys we figured out the title! Okay well, we decided that We Are Not Who You Think We Are was really way too long. I mean come on, even the acronym is crazy. It was actually kind of an accident the way we figured out the title and the poster. We decided to name the documentary Z. As you can see in the poster above, they have a subtitle "When you realize getting some means wanting more." So we made our subtitle, "We Are Not Who You Think We Are." What we decided to do is make our overarching "brand" the We Are Gen Z Project. Then our documentary, Z, would be our current project. Our social campaign is #WeAreGenZ. The Z for our documentary stems from the whole Gen Z idea since our documentary is for and about Gen Zers. You can see more details about the website in my next post no worries!

Oh here's a fun fact! So while I was making the poster I had to create the release date. I decided to do the month, date, and year with periods in between. But then, I thought to myself, "Kassidy, does the date matter?" Since I could't answer my own question I believed a search on Google could. So I went to Google and I searched, "does a movie's release date matter?" The answer to that question is Yes!

"Traditionally, the beginning of the year is seen as a much quieter and lower-profile time at the box office than, say, the summer blockbuster season- traditionally between May and August- or the end of the year in November and December, when both blockbusters and awards season hopefuls appear."

That lovely quote is credit to the informative website I have linked for you here.

Bye peeps!
        

Poster Rant

Hey there!

So, I'm trying to make the poster for our film and it's been a rough journey, as it should be. My first idea was inspired by the Game of Thrones poster on the side. Instead in my poster it would be pictures of our subjects laid out like that with the words "We Are Not Who You Think We Are"  where it says Game of Thrones. I'm kind of floundering between ideas right now. I looked up TV posters on Google to get some inspiration  but it didn't help much. I'm just not sure whether or not we should have all our subjects on the poster or just one of them; or even if we should have a picture of the subjects at all.

I also had the idea to just have Chey on the poster but then I went back to my eternal dilemma of having her or all the subjects on there. After all, she is the third episode so it seems off to have her as the image on our promotional poster for the season because the audience won't be introduced to her until the third episode of the series.

So it just hit me that we decided against including Chey in the intro. This means that our intro won't feature every subject in it because we limited it to 5 people. Also, I actually looked up what a miniseries really is and found that #1 they are close-ended and #2 they are like extended TV movies.  Considering the fact that we planned on having a second season I would say our documentary TV series is more of a limited series. A limited series allows us the flexibility of more potential seasons and the ability to have a smaller amount of episodes per season. Whew, that was a close misunderstanding.  Conclusion: the intro subjects will just represent Gen Zers, the people we target as well as the people we are trying to accurately portray.

Here's a slight side note:
I actually told my father a little bit what our project was about and he disagreed with me. He believes what the media says about teens is correct and Gen Z's portrayal doesn't need to be corrected. My dad is the perfect representative of the traditional people and media stereotypes we're trying to argue against. The media portrays teens in an overwhelmingly bad light. I'm not saying that everything they put out there is wrong. I'm just saying that it's not an accurate depiction of who we really are. Yes, sometimes we can be lazy or overemotional. The truth is those are characteristics of any age or generation. I argue that we are not ONLY lazy or over emotional but that we are ALSO dedicated, motivated, inspired, appreciate, and aware.

Thank you for reading my jumbled mess of thoughts, see you soon!

Hooking the Fish

Hi friends!

Now that we have made some progress on the film side and we finally have actual film to work with, I've decided to look into the marketing for our documentary and website. I found this amazing info graphics (sorry I'm a Gen Z, visual-loving gal!) Gen Zers are not only not interested in advertising, but they also have very short attention spans. Basically, our advertisement has to be a short snippet that will hook them and at the same time not feel like we're trying to advertise. Gen Z kids spend about 15.4 hours per week on their smartphone. Of those hours, they spend them mostly on Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.

I found Snapchat's advertising website and it gave a really good breakdown of the different ways to advertise on their app as well as success stories. Snap Ads not only gives you an up to 10 second video but you can specifically target, "Snapchatters by age, gender, geographical location, mobile device, operating system (Android or iOS), mobile carrier, interests, Snapchat's first-party audiences, lookalikes, and purchase intent with Datalogix segments." Additionally, Snapchat allows you to attach links to o your advertisement. For example, Snapchat Ads Article allows you to attach an article that can include text, in-line videos that auto play, animated GIFs, as well as images and galleries. You can run Snap Ads Article campaigns in Discover Editions and Shows. This would work for us because we could link our website to our advertisement.

More specifically, I was looking into how TV shows advertise on Snapchat. The Bachelor has had success advertising by creating a "show" on Netflix. The ABC Watch Party: the Bachelor series is two programs at once. It's produced in vertical video, like holding a phone upright, with clips from the previous night's episode of the dating reality series on the bottom of the screen.  On top: a trio of fans on top sitting on the couch offering their opinions of the show. Watch party moves along at a Snapchat like fast-forward speed, and before you know it, you've watched two commercials and the show, and it's all over. Loire the photons and videos that get snapped and shared on Snapchat, the Watch Part episode disappears within 24 hours. There's no archive of past episodes available for viewing online, as with other mediums.

I'm loving Snapchat as a way to market our miniseries and target our audience. Other than an advertisement on YouTube, this would successfully garner an audience. I'm going to continue looking into some other ways to advertise. The marketing campaign project we did for a deck of cards earlier in the year has given me a lot of ideas for our miniseries. I'll go talk to Chey and continue working hard!

Until next time!

Shots Fired

Hello guys!

So we finally finally finally filmed for the first time! It was a very close call because my Boss last mintuedly called me in to go to this workshop for work. Luckily I won't even be working there much longer so I worked my way out of it. This date is just super important because our deadline is VERY VERY close and we haven't got much to work with. Thursday was our first day to film and it was the only time we could do it because our schedules are so busy. We ended up filming 5 beautiful subjects for our intro. We forced our friends into our dark lair and told them to look depressed (at least for the first part of the intro). So in the first part we used the projector (shout out to Laurel) and the slide that I showed you in my last post.


She's so great! I really love how a lot of the film came out. We also recorded everyone saying all the lines that way in editing we can just pick and choose who sounds better saying what. We shot a multitude of different angles for every subject. For example, we had side shots (from both sides) and mid shots. We tried some low angle shots for the second portion to support the empowered content. The second portion is where the subjects look empowered despite the negative words surrounding them. The voiceover narration is gonna have the subjects each saying, "We are innovators. We are..."

We got a lot of good stuff and I'm so excited to go through it all and start piecing our documentary together. Since we didn't want to take up all the storage on my phone and my mac's disc is full we airdropped all of the videos straight to Chey's computer as we went along. In between subjects we got the chance to look at some of the videos and we had a teensy problem. It turns out our projector decided to be annoying and turn a yellowish color for some of the videos. It OK though! We figured out how to manipulate the color to better match the original color of our content. I have to admit it was slightly stressful realizing it turned a different color. But it was just another obstacle we managed to get around!

We shall soon meet again my friends!

So Close But So Far!

Hey guys!

So this post is a tad off schedule but it's ok! I know we'll still have a great time. Let's start with the script for the content portion of the episode. That's been mainly written by my partner because it's focused on her and her life (not something I would know as well). I've helped by throwing in ideas now what the content should be about. For example, I would suggest that we need to say the problem at hand (misrepresentation) and how that has effected her. Then Chey goes and writes the personal bits that are super important. Also, we went through the script and did some editing because we realized that we had a teeny tiny problem. Since the documentary is poetic we want the content of our voiceover narration to be just as abstract as the visuals will be. So we ended up scrapping some of the previous script we had written. It's all good though because that's what progress is all about! Here's a tiny sneak peek:

"Muscles ignore pleads to rise from my haven of warmth, eyes shut tight to shield my heart from the realities of the world, dreams dance upon my eyelids, begging to see the light of day. 18 years of resilience. 18 years of persistence. 18 years of kindness. 18 years of liveliness."

I hope you're just as excited as I am for our documentary's debut!

Anyways, so we had to use a projector to create our Brooke Davis inspired shot. Here's a picture just in case you forgot. Luckily, our good friend Laurel had a projector we could borrow. I was in charge of creating the slide for it. I used KeyNote, it's the mac version of powerpoint. We had planned out that we were going to go for a similar image. Our idea was to use more general terms that are used to misrepresent teens in the media, that way it would establish the collective problem all of us Gen Z-ers face. It would also link together our subjects. By the way we want at least 5 subjects but we've scheduled about 9 just in case. So my slide looks like this:

The game plan is to project this beautiful image onto a blank wall in my room and then have our subjects stand in front of it. They'll need to look dejected for the parts where we have the voiceover (of each of their voices) saying, "they call us..(negative word).." Then, we'll have them looking empowered for the part "But they're wrong" and "We are..(positive word).."


Alright well tata for now! My next post will have the updates on how the shooting went!

Brainstorming Again

Hey guys!

So I never got the opportunity to share how the group discussions with our classmates went. There really wasn't much my group mates could help me with at the movement considering our biggest problems were the script for our piece and the title. While we do love the title, We Are Not Who You Think We Are it is kind of a mouthful. I mean the abbreviation itself is super long (WANWYTWA); is that crazy or what? My group mates agreed and recommended we do a shorter title as well. One of my group mates suggested "Perspective" and while it's good I don't think it quite fits yet. Clearly this problem is going to take some reflection and some analyzation of our piece. Initially, we figured we could come up with something after editing are project but now that we've start filming I was looking for some inspiration. Naturally, I went to Google  to do some research and I found a couple interesting articles about how to create a title for our documentary. Some of the key things were: creating a short title, unique word choices for memorability, and easy accessibility of the title. I guess I'm back to the brainstorming!


See you later alligators!

Lights, Set, Action!

Hello everyone!

I'm back and I've got news for you! So Chey cam over my house on Friday night to begin the film process. We also managed to schedule our subjects to film the intro next week. Lucky for us, we have good friends and although we only need about 5, we have 9 people coming for the shoot. Here's a video to show you a little behind the scene look of our lighting set up:

So as you can clearly tell we had to get pretty creative to get the effect we were looking for. I have to say though, the results were great! We plan on using this lighting and background for the main content of the episode. Cheyenne is our main subject and we're going to film a multitude of shots with different angles for her portion of the episode. We decided to use a voice over narration with music in the background and pair it with abstract visuals. Some of the visuals will be the shots we take of Cheyenne with this background and others will be "random" shots.

We also plan on using the same background for the projector shots in the intro. We have to test out the projector first and create the slide. That's for next week though, so more updates on that will come later. Anyway, we have picked out the non-copyright music we plan on using in our excerpt and most of Chey's script is done. I'm really excited for all the progress we've made!

See you soon!