Critical Reflection - Film Poster

Critical Reflection - Film Poster Y.A Fantasy

The media that I will use is the movie poster with title of The House with our chosen genre of young adult, specifically fantasy. 

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issue?

My product, the film poster of The House in genre of young adult fantasy uses the conventions of East Asian (Chinese) animation films. We can see this by the color pallet that mostly consist of red and touches of gold, which are seen as lucky colors in China. For the title itself we also use the simplified Chinese characters known as Hanzi to further highlight the fact that this movie is based in China, East Asia. For the poster itself we follow most conventions by incorporating these codes; red and gold colors, hanzi and the Chinese aesthetics such as the red string and the type of house used in the poster. But we also challenged a convention by covering the main character's face partially, by this it is because in a lot of c-anime, they rely a lot of main character's visual to attract audiences. So, by covering their face it can create a sense of mystery and make audience more curious about the plot and the aesthetic of the mise-en-scene than fully on the visual of the character.

In our product, we embrace the stereotype of aesthetics of Chinese animation and the typical representation of male to be more adventurous but following the synopsis of the poster, it shows the stereotypical personality of guys being stubborn, rebellious and not knowledgeable.

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Our target audience are those who like animation and east asian aesthetics. Mostly focusing on female audiences as we can see, the main character being male but can still be targeted toward male as it can be considered as a movie with a lot of actions and adventure. The age of our audiences are teenagers (young adult) as the plot maybe perceived to be a bit mature for children and their hobby maybe like books, movies and art. The audience may fall into categories of explorer and struggler where their main core is discovery and escape.

If this become a real media text, it will be produced professionally by graphic designers. Although I don’t have a specific designer in mind, I would prefer those who are based in East Asia with deep understanding of the aim of the poster without creating controversies and goes against stereotypes. In terms of where I think this ad will be shown, I would say it’s very flexible, can be shown anywhere although the main target may be East Asian, I’m sure it can be accepted in other places too.

How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

When I first just started doing this, I actually felt very confident and very assured of doing this genre and this project itself. But this actually opened my eyes a lot more, as in there were actually a lot of steps and research that had to be put in while I personally am not fond of doing research so I did backwards step instead where I work my way out by having my final idea in and working around it. So definitely one skill I somewhat improved in is my research skills, and a skill I learned is designing one from scratch. In this project, we did have to make a lot of changes throughout and most of them being pretty last minute, for example we changed our mind of the design of the poster entirely to make it better.

But from this experience, I found out I feel more comfortable in concept development comparing to analysis (research) and designing although I can still feel a lot of possible room of improvement in all of the stages. 

How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware and online - in this project?

For this project, I rely on my iPad the most, we used Picsart, Phonto and Pinterest the most, I also used Goodnotes to explore the fonts in Hanzi. I used Pinterest mostly in the research part, to look for the inspiration posters and also to find the main picture that is in our final draft, which is the background picture. We used both Picsart and Phonto for the editing section, Picsart was for combining the pictures, adding extra elements towards the poster and to basically creating the background to be what we wanted. We used Phonto to edit the text, to add the word components of the poster, such as the title, production company and actors. We used Jamboard for our collaborative research as there we can also do handwritten annotation which in my opinion is very useful when we were doing the analysis. We used blogspot for the collected, final information, although at first I find it a bit tedious but I find it really nice as it organizes the information really well making it easier to process.