Critical Reflection

The main element I wanted to be consistent throughout every piece of content produced in relation to the production was duality. When I was coming up with ideas for what I wanted my production to be, the idea of duality or two worlds came to me pretty early on, so throughout the whole process of creating the production it was always in mind. 

The title of Double Feature was one of my first ideas for a title, but as I kept thinking of more it felt like the best fit. It relate to duality, it related to movies, it was perfect! That title led to this logo being created:

As you can see, the most prominent features of this logo are the split down the middle and each word being a different color. That logo is one of the most important aspects of the entire production it is used in many different places as part of the branding. To name a few, it's used in both trailers, it's on the poster, it's the profile picture for the social media account, and it's been posted separately as a GIF that's able to be shared by fans of the production. Additionally, the red, black, and white color scheme, used for the title also applies to many of the aforementioned places.

My production engages with the audience in many ways. The direct way would probably be its connections to social media. Just the idea of a trailer or poster existing is part of the engagement, as the whole point of a trailer or poster is to increase awareness for a production. And speaking of trailers, one way the trailers engage with the audience is shown at the very start. It's been found that when someone is scrolling through social media, a video only a has 1 to 2-second opportunity to catch their attention, which is why you often see "mini trailers" during the first few seconds of a trailer before the actual trailer starts. Another way to catch the viewer's attention in this way is to show a title card saying that the trailer is about to start.

Much like showing a mini trailer, by showing this title card at the very start trailer, you're instantly telling the audience what they're watching or about to watch without them having to even read the text associated with the post.

This engagement also works in the opposite direction. At the very end of the trailers, I included a title card that shows off a link to the Twitter account and also a hashtag associated with the production. This card prompts viewers of the trailer to go to the social media page for more content associated with the production, and by using a hashtag, it allows fans of the production to further spread the production as if they use it in one of their posts, their followers and can see it and so on and so forth.

In a way, the last 365 days of my life have been research for this project, as I've spent the last year watching as many horror movies as I can to catch myself up for not having watched horror movies. That being said, in watching so many I've definitely noticed many aspects of horror movies that I wanted to both subvert and also sometimes lean into. The place where I learned the most about the tropes is in marketing. For example, while many movies often have a teaser, 2 trailers, and sometimes a final trailer, horror movies usually have 2 trailers at the very most, and if its a slasher they often just have a teaser/shorter trailer and a final trailer promoting that tickets are now on sale. Since this project s meant to include 2 full-length trailers, I tried to incorporate elements of teasers and final trailers into my 2 main trailers while still keeping them as full-length trailers (The first trailer being more like a teaser and the second trailer being more like a final trailer).

Speaking of the trailer, that was a surprisingly difficult part of the whole process. Usually, editing comes pretty easily to me, but the issue here was that I just had way too much footage. When planning out and creating shot lists for each trailer, I overestimated how much I could actually fit into 2 minutes. By the time I was done filming I had over 100 clips to use across both trailers and I once I started editing I had to reorganize my whole plan. I had to simplify the story, speed up the pacing, and much more. In addition to that, I had a scene that I really wanted to film that was important to the trailer but the person who was going to be in it wasn't able to do it at the very last moment so I had to work around that as well. In the end, I think it all worked out. The upside of having so much footage is that I was able to make both trailers pretty different from each other, as originally they were going to have a lot more overlapping footage. 

But out of all of this, my biggest takeaway was the importance of planning. This year I really focused on planning out everything I wanted to film with detailed shot lists for each trailer, and then I compiled both of the shot lists into a list that told me which shots were to be filmed at each location, which was super helpful during filming. Also, casting was a difficult part of the process as well. Asking people to help me with anything is something that is very hard for me, as I always have a voice in my head saying that they're going to say no so I'm always nervous. That translates to me being very nervous to ask people to be in my production, even if they're good friends of mine. Luckily, Noah and Ivan were able to help me film and be in the videos and I'm very thankful that they said yes and were available.

I learned a lot from this experience, and I hope to use what I learned in the future (much like how what I learned has year helped me with doing this).