My CR

 This year my group and I have worked hard, and we created our product which is a short film about a girl who is getting bullied and gets help from a surprising friend. It is supposed to represent the struggles some kids go through and how alone they can feel sometimes. It represents the issue that a lot of kids go through daily, whether it be online or in person, bullying.  Bullying has always been a problem, kids who are preserved as different get ostracized from their social peers. Aria, the main character, is a lonely girl who doesn’t really know how to interact with other kids and because of her introverted nature she gets bullied. In the film she explains how even when she tried to tell the teachers or get them to acknowledge the bullying it gets brushed off. Bullying, while more acknowledged, still happens a lot even with people trying to teach why it's wrong. This movie is supposed to show how even though Aria felt like there was nothing she could do and all alone, there are still people out there who will help and be there for her. Everyone needs help sometimes, but you have to learn to stand up for yourself against people who are going to judge you for being different from them. While Emma helped Aria defend herself against her bully, it was ultimately Aria who finally took a stand for herself and said that she wasn’t going to take it anymore.  Hopefully for people who watch it they will get that message and it will help them with their own situation.  I know that when writing and working as a group we really wanted to create a brand with this film and put a mark as if it was ours. The film itself has the focus of the flower around it, and from there we created our title and everything else the film would have to give it a certain feeling. With the flower we are able to have a special attribute so when people hear of the film, the flower is not just the title we picked out that happens to be in the. It's also a way for us to have a brand with it and the flower can be created in different forms. Some of the elements that give our film that sense of branding are the social media websites we use for It such as Instagram. We also have our own website created to let others know about our short film and how they can watch it, and what others have to say about it.  The media aspect and the film itself work in harmony to create a brand which everyone will want to enjoy and experience. I want to do more for the branding but I'm not sure how I would do so. If I could, I would look for more aspects in the film I would want to focus on and have as more than just what they are now. Just like how branding is used to promote the product, the short film, we also use it to interact and engage with our audiences. One of the ways we use to interact with audiences is Instagram. Through Instagram we post videos, and we go through the comments to see how people feel about it. We also have our own direct messages so if anyone has any inquiries about the film, we can respond back to them and answer what they ask. It's an easy, safe way to interact with our audiences and even create polls to what they would like to see in the short film. Another way we interact with our audience is through the website we created. While It's not the same as Instagram, it's still a good way for us to interact with the audience and even show them how others feel about our short films. On the website we have reviews from different people so they can see what others think about our short film and get a good sense of what it is. Overall, I think that we have found great ways to interact with audiences with our product and it's all through social media. While social media does have its downfalls, it has done a lot to help us in terms of promoting our films and giving us a way to talk to our audience and give them an idea of what's happening. We actually researched some other ways to use social media for our film and what would be the best way to promote our film. We did a lot of research for the film and everything we would want to do about it. Through our research we were able to find how bullying is usually done in films and how to use conventions with it. While other films tend to have a darker theme in how bullies are delt with, we tried to use our film to have a more positive view on how we can deal with bullies. It isn't killing bullies with kindness, nor is it on the darker end on the spectrum and fighting the bullies. Instead, Aria decided to deal with the bullies by telling them to just leave her alone. Once Aria finally realized that their words shouldn’t matter to her, she stopped letting them affect her and let herself listen to someone else who cares about her and was willing to stick up to them for her. This is the way that our film challenges certain conventions and what certain things usually are in films. We were able to find all of this and decided all of it through research. It was useful to research these kinds of things and find ways on how we want our film to stand out from others. It also has a nice, sweet kind of focus with darker undertones on what aria was really going through in the end and what was really going on.