Planning My Creative and Critical Process

 Blog #13:

Our film that we created is called "Malfeasance". We chose the name of our title since our film is a traditional crime film with mystery elements about a detective that has been put on a murder case, which he is determined to solve, and the definition of "malfeasance" is an act that is illegal and causes physical or monetary harm to someone else, and is a synonym to the word crime. Moreover, the film follows the detective investigating a specific suspect, which is a very popular high school girl who is heavily connected to the victim of the case. Additionally, a common theme of the film is that no one is to be trusted in the town, everyone is suspicious.

Our mise-en-scene was to be in the mannerisms of young adults today and their style nowadays as well, which is using slang and wearing streetwear. But the mannerism of the of the main suspect, Alexis, is nervous and she seems like she is trying to hide something. 

The detective is wearing more office clothes but he seems tired and a little out of it since he has been obsessed and working on the case for a long time. We also made sure that the detectives office looked chaotic but at the same time like a traditional office by having a bunch of papers lying on the desk and pencils and pens. But the process of making the suspect board was a long process to make it look as chaotic and as professional as possible by using red string, pictures from crime scenes, pictures of the character who is missing and the main suspect, and many sticky notes with notes.

The sound is in the traditional way of a crime film, where there is suspicious music over scenes where the detective is working or when something suspicious is occurring. The cinematography has dull lighting when the detective is working or when there is a flashback is occurring. The editing also has many transitions to show what a certain character is doing at that time or to show when a flashback is about to occur. Usually, crime films follow the detective trying to figure out who the suspect is, but our film challenged that by showing the chase of the suspect and showing flashbacks of what the suspect has done and why they have done it.

We chose our production company by finding which company had the most best selling crime films and seeing their style of filming. Our film would be exhibited and marketed by previewing it on social media platforms and targeting it to the specific audience of crime lovers. Crime lovers would watch our film because it has the plot of chasing the suspect instead of trying to figure out who did it, which is different from many crime films, so it would be more intriguing to watch. A film that is very similar to our film is the movie Batman from 2022 since it is very detective like and just has a very similar plot without all of the superhero aspects.

We learned how to plan when to film by using a free calendar app that we shared everybody's schedule to see when everybody would be free to film. 

We didn't have an issue of sound most of the time, but when we did we figured out how to fix it. The editing was not an easy task but since we had a person in our group who had experience it wasn't as hard to figure everything out.The directing and shooting was very easy to find out from the beginning since we would already know how we wanted everything to look. The drafting was easy to follow since we would always have a different format to follow for each project, like for the music video project we planned on a printed paper of the lyrics what we were going to film on certain lyrics, and for the final project we had our script that we wrote down for it. I will leave this class more skilled because I now know how to plan to film something and how to shoot it and edit it.

In the beginning of the year we believed that we had to use a digital camera for our projects to look good. But we ended up learning that it didn't matter if we used a camera phone because it still looked good. We believed it would be easier to use the camera phone because it was easier to access and we didn't have to worry about the battery of it draining and have to wait to film again, since we all had phones that we could record off of. We also learned that we didn't need a fancy editing app for our film to work. When we got a fancy editing app it would malfunction multiple times and we would have to start all over but we found a better, free editing app that worked even better. We ended up using apple movies to edit our film.