My CCR!

 Welcome back bloggers, this time for the FINAL BLOG POST! In this post, you will find my Creative Critical Reflection for my project and film opener, "Super"-Hero! This CCR is essentially a summary of the path I took to create this film, as well as all the things I learned along the way and what became the final product (Think of it as my whole blog summarized into a presentation!) With this, my documental journey from clueless Media Studies student to seasoned film producer sadly comes to an end... Regardless, it was fun to go on this journey, and I would do it again! (Just not as a job though.)

My CCR: https://prezi.com/view/7qL5cpVGWzdkIQFIz1OT/

Linguini Productions presents... "Super"-Hero!

 Welcome back bloggers! The coveted day is FINALLY here. Our FINALIZED version of our film opener, "Super"-Hero, is AVAILABLE NOW!!!

"Super"-Hero:

Synopsis

It's a bright sunny day in a seemingly uneventful neighborhood. The birds are chirping, the sun is shining, cars are sitting still in driveways. But, all is not as peaceful as it seems. A band of EVIL robbers spring up and prepare to launch a great heist upon these innocent homes. They move quickly and quietly, taking whatever they want and taking care of anyone who gets in their way. Who ever will save this poor neighborhood from these greedy freaks? Against odds like these, only one man can save the day: A powerful man!

Credits

This film was directed by none other than our great savior himself: Yulian Vargas! He was the front-man in all the filming, all the creative design, and ESPECIALLY as our main star! Additionally, I myself was the executive producer. I was in charge of securing props, actors, crew, and keeping the project on schedule and within the 2-minute time frame. Next up, my friend Pablo Mendez was the lead editor and composer for the film, being in charge of making our film look as pretty as possible! Our main cast, of course, featured myself, Pablo Mendez, Yulian Vargas, Pedro Rodriguez, and our special guest appearance: Sebastian Rodriguez! Sebastian may have only been a guest appearance, but his presence certainly made our film special!

What if we didn't choose to film "Super"-Hero?

Welcome back bloggers! Today, we will be exploring an interesting hypothetical: What if we chose another brainstorming idea instead of "Super"-Hero? 

Concept 1: Manuel y Linguini

Looking back, this idea was OBJECTIVELY our worst one at the time. However, it also would have been a bit easier to film. All we'd really need is Mario and Luigi costumes and the rest could simply be acted out! However, that's really where the benefits for having picked this option end. The concept of showing a childhood flashback and then a confrontation scene would have required too much time to actually work properly, and would have worked better as a short film. Additionally, finding an actor to play their mother would have been RIDICULOUSLY hard. We'd need to find an older woman, and picking any actor that differed in age from us would be neigh impossible. For the same reason, the childhood flashback would have been difficult to film since we'd need the help of children, who may be difficult to get to act properly.

Concept 3: Something in the Forest?

Something in the Forest? was actually our original plan for the final project, and although it would've turned out cool, this was impossible to film for a few reasons. Firstly, we'd have needed to film outdoors for EVERY scene. Secondly, this outdoor filming would have to occur at night for EVERY scene. These 2 factors alone made the film impossible to create since filming in the woods at night is not only something NOBODY wanted to do, but also because it's a stupid idea that could potentially be dangerous. Propping and costumes for this film would have been on the lower side, seeing as we'd only have needed basically a flashlight and some old clothes, but that's where the benefits end. Lighting would have been too dark, filming would be impossible, and the film itself would have been quite boring. So, with all that in mind, "Super"-Hero was our BEST idea yet by FAR!

What was our inspiration for "Super"-Hero?

 Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be talking about our inspiration for "Super"-Hero, and I don't just mean the plot. As we approach the date where our final product will be shown to the world, I thought it'd be fitting to go right back to the start, and talk about everything that inspired us along the way!

Beloved childhood shows!

Obviously, since our film mainly appeals to younger audiences, we used shows from our childhood for inspiration! Looking back, one of the biggest influences on our film was Teen Titans Go! from Cartoon Network. After all, Robin was our main inspiration for Power-Man's costume in the early days, and we even planned to match his color scheme!  This show specifically had a great blend of action and brain-rotting comedy that was sure to make any parent want to rip out their hair after listening to it for 2 hours. However, we couldn't just slap a thousand fart jokes in our opener and call it a day, so we had to branch off from comedic influence. As far as Power-Man's actual mannerisms went, Paul Blart was a GREAT influence on how our not-so-super hero could behave. Paul Blart as a character is meant to be goofy while placed in a serious-looking role, so he was the PERFECT character to model Power-Man off of!

Marvel Studios!

Obviously, you can't make a superhero-themed piece of media in the 21st century without taking SOME inspiration from Marvel Comics or Marvel Studios. After all, Marvel content made up probably 90% of our mood board for our project! Although Power-Man is definitely more aligned with DC heroes than Marvel, we took a lot of inspiration from the latter as superhero comedies is what they're all about! Movies like Ant-Man: Quantumania, Thor: Ragnarok, and the old Spider-Man films all served as great inspiration for how we wanted not only Power-Man to look like, but also the robbers! The Ant-Man films in particular were great for this since Scott Lang used to steal for a living, so all we had to do was adapt that heist-esque character for our robbers and put our own goofy twist on how we acted. Additionally, Marvel served as a great example of what NOT to do when making our opening as comedic as possible. Since recently Marvel has developed a reputation for forcing comedy into every scene imaginable, we decided it'd be best to go for a balance of action and silliness so that our film wouldn't feel like another Phase 5 box office flop!

My experience playing a robber in "Super"-Hero!

Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be discussing my acting role in our film, "Super"-Hero, that being of course one of the robbers! 

    

Robbers from left to right: Pablo, Myself, Pedro

Getting accustomed to the role!

Getting into the mindset of a robber straight out of a cartoon was BY NO MEANS the easiest thing in the world. I remember on our first day of filming I kept trying out different accents, mannerisms, and different ways I could add to the character. Particularly, on the first day of filming I got carried away with doing a Russian accent for the robber, but we didn't film nearly enough for the accent to make much of a difference. Then, after renovating our entire game plan, I had the opportunity to try something different with my character during the Power-Man confrontation. I decided I'd go for a sarcastic and somewhat cocky personality since I thought it would blend well with Power-Man's own extravagance. In theory AND in practice, this ended up working super well for the confrontation, since it allowed us to highlight Power-Man's own over-the-top mannerisms in contrast to the seemingly normal robbers. All in all, I'm SUPER happy with how both my character and the rest of the cast turned out to be in the film! 

What I learned!

Before getting into this project, even before we had settled on "Super"-Hero as an idea, I knew I wanted to play some sort of antagonist. I thought playing a bad guy would be second nature for me specifically because of my own personality and voice, and to an extent I was right! I didn't necessarily have any issues acting my parts out, except for the scene where we first saw Power-Man but that was because being mentally prepared for Pedro screaming "MAN WHO IS THAT?" right behind me came with its own set of challenges. If there was one main lesson I learned from my experience in playing this robber, it's that physically acting is not as easy as some people make it seem. Acting is not just putting on a cool voice and moving around, and it encompasses COUNTLESS smaller details. Sometimes you need certain small head tilts, or wait a few milliseconds before moving a single limb, and especially you need to literally BECOME the character you play. These were all things that I tried my best to tackle head-on, especially since it was my robber character who would confront Power-Man, but with limited time and a fairly exhausted crew I had to go with what I knew for certain I could pull off and not experiment too much. What I do know is that if we had as many filming days as we wanted with infinite energy, I would probably have played a VERY different character than the one I played on-screen, but for what we had, I turned out pretty good!

Superhero Comedies 101!

 Welcome back bloggers! In today's post, I will be talking about "Super"-Hero and our attempts to fit our desired genre of a superhero comedy, including what we did right and what we had to change on set!

Making our film "funny"!

For how much we talked about making our film a generic superhero comedy, we did a SURPRISINGLY bad job at making the film funny in any sort of way during the first storyboard and film phase! During storyboarding, our assumption was sort of that we'd just make up the comedy along the way during the events of the film. There were barely any moments where we purposefully wrote scenes out to have comedic effect. On the 3rd and 4th film days, however, we remembered what genre our film was and we began ACTING accordingly (ba-dum tsss)! In all seriousness, we came up with some great ideas after we scrapped the robbery scene, such as having a crowbar be able to speak and having the Hooded Robber tell the Homeowner to go back to sleep as if his home wasn't being ransacked! The best comedic scene, in my personal opinion, was Power-Man getting knocked out by the Beanie Robber! This scene used to look stale, but after we made some tweaks, such as Power-Man doing a wind-up punch only to start flapping his arms and editing a BONK sound once he got whacked, it became an absolute gem among our film. Pablo really knows his thing when it comes to sound effects!

What else could we have done?

In all honesty, what we did in the film was kind of the limit on comedy that we could put in. We didn't want the film to be so ridiculous that the plot loses all meaning, but also not be so serious to where it just becomes boring. Additionally, being limited to 2 minutes meant there wasn't a whole lot of wiggle room if we wanted to keep a balance of comedy and action in our opening. Now, if we were able to go up to 5 minutes for the opening, things would have been different. We'd probably be able to fit the robbery scene that we cut, and there's PLENTY of comedic potential in that scene alone. Some ideas we had for that scene were: the Alien robber forgetting his money bag, the Alien robber having a strange obsession with stealing belts, and the robbers all getting flung into the air when Power-Man landed! If making a crowbar talk and having Sebastian make loud snoring noises produced comedic effect, then more time to implement those ideas would have made our opening thrice as funny as it is now!

The simplicity behind filming "Super"-Hero!

 Welcome back, bloggers! In today's post, I will be addressing an interesting choice we made during the filming of "Super"-Hero: Why did we not choose to rent special camera equipment? 

Why did we choose not to do it?

The short answer is we didn't think we'd need it. In our group, Yulian and Pablo already had prior experience filming on mobile phone, and all of our phones had decent quality cameras. This plus the fact that one of us had tripods at home further convinced us that we wouldn't need to rent out special equipment. It's not like renting out special equipment was an impossible feat either. Prior to filming, a media team had come to our school and offered their services for rental in case we wanted some more premium filming capabilities. They had cameras, microphones, and even lights! However, at the end of the day, we felt that we could produce a perfectly good film opener without such special equipment, and not doing so also gave us flexibility with scheduling film dates!

Did we ever regret not renting special equipment?

On the third day of filming, there came a time where shaky filming became an issue, particularly for when we were filming the robbers breaking into the house initially. This was one of the only times where we felt that having special camera equipment would have benefitted us, and even then we were able to persevere with a little bit of practice! Overall, we never regretted our choice to not rent out special equipment simply because we didn't need it. Our main priorities were finishing the film on time while getting the best possible shots we could get, and finding fancy equipment would've just cost us time and money. Would our film have looked better if we used said special equipment? Absolutely, but just with a couple of mobile phones and a small tripod we were able to produce some absolutely stellar footage. Another factor is that we already knew how to film with phones for the most part. If we got special equipment, we'd need to spend time learning how to use said equipment, and as you've seen in all of my filming day blogs, time was the ONE thing we NEVER had enough of!