So what have I been up to? (Part 2)

 As I said in my last blog post I wanted to talk about a project we did following the Documentary project. The Film distribution project focused on getting us familiar with the intricacies of film distribution and how they impact the ways that a film gets out to the public. My group and I had to produce both a teaser and a trailer for a film, along with a presentation that explained our marketing plan and distribution tactics. 

The "film" we made was based on a short story written by one of the students in our creative writing class. It told a tale of a mountain town where it always rains, everyone is tired of the rain and therefore does nothing about it. A 10-year-old kid decides he will take the lead and ignore the rain, but because of this the mountain becomes enraged and chaos ensues. The story mirrors real-world themes of ignorance to social problems, specifically Covid-19 and climate change. This gave us ideas for the ways that we would distribute the film. We researched social commentary films similar to this one, Parasite and Don't look up were our two case studies, and found some interesting information. Social commentary films usually distribute their films to smaller places at first such as festivals and events, this is the case for Parasite which was first released to smaller film festivals and then distributed more widely after being picked up by a distributor. We thought this would work for our film since the main approach was to get the film out to as many people as possible. Don't look up went the way of digital distribution, something that we thought would work similarly for us since our target audience prefers watching films through digital mediums. 

The teaser and trailer production went a lot smoother than we were expecting, even though for a majority of it we were practically rushing through. We had a day before filming where we did all the blocking for the piece, and this really saved us when it came to editing as we found out that we simply did not have enough footage, which allowed us to create more shots to fill the 2 minute total run time. Filming went mostly fine except for the unexpected weather conditions outside. We live in Florida, so we were really not expecting freezing weather outside, especially when we had to fake rain. We fought through the freezing "rain" and even though our hands almost shattered to pieces were able to get all of those scenes done. When it came to filming outside, one-shot gave us a lot of trouble. We needed to have a scene with an old tv box displaying an analog signal, but we simply did not have any of these things. No worries though, technology to the rescue! I used the 3D Lidar scanner on my phone to create an accurate 3d scan of the living room of one of my teammates. I then imported this into the 3D program "Blender" and imported and textured a 3d model of an old box tv. After figuring out some lighting things, the shot was finished and it looked like it was not even fake!

Working on this project went a lot smoother than our previous projects, and I think a reason for that is that we went about it in a more relaxed manner. Instead of stressing ourselves with making the best piece possible, we instead focused on having fun creating while still maintaining ourselves on task. However, it would have been good to apply ourselves just a little bit more so that we weren't rushing by the end. You can check it out here!