critical reflection

 

The short film Writing on the bathroom walls is a film created to represent Young queer teens who are struggling to accept themselves. It shows the emotional turmoil that many young people part of the LGBTQ + struggle with daily. This is shown in the short film but the main character Moon, who is constantly struggling to come to terms with who she is because of her sexuality. She kind of looks up and has a crush on this openly queer girl at her school. We wanted to show a different side of struggling with their sexuality, which is to say it isn't always just about an outside person, such as friends or parents being the one to make you feel like you need to hide your sexuality, but it can be your own self holding you back. In this short film, there is no outside force telling Moon that she shouldn't be who she is. There is only her inner turmoil, yet she still has this overwhelming fear of finally being who she is Which can be seen when she's fleeting the classroom. There is a scene showing what she wishes she was but you can tell that she is scared of it, but she learns to trust herself. The clothing choice was deliberate to represent this self-consciousness and fear she feels and at first she's wearing a very big baggy clothes and Gray do represent her as kind of small and scared, and then as she changes clothes, she starts getting into A more and more colorful outfits to represent that her confidence is going up, she wears the very bright pride flag in her reflection as a way to show where she wants to be,  and even at the end, she's not wearing a very bright outfit because she's still not as confident in herself as she could be showing that she's still going to have to work on herself to feel as confident as everyone around her. This shows that accepting yourself is a journey and that It's OK to still be on the journey of finding a way to be more confident in your authentic self.

Social media was made with a very specific brand in mind. Since the first post we wanted to use doodles such as you would find on a bathroom wall as our focus on our brand. Even though we know that most of the time the writing is black we thought that adding more color to the overall social media would make the film feel more like intended genre, coming of age, that usually features film with bright colors. I did a lot of research of what would be seen as interesting by looking at others films social media such as edge of seventeen and trinkets who have a similar age range to see what the best way was to get people in our target audience, queer teens and young adults, to interact with our page. Colors was one of them but also putting up behind the scenes videos are always fun to watch If we keep them short., as well as bloopers make the post more engaging and have audience want to come back to our page for more content, hopefully leading for them to end at our film.  We also planned on having things that you can buy, such as merch, such we each took a piece of the wall, and we thought that would be a fun thing to put on Instagram to sell to audiences as limited time which gets audiences to engage more because people like getting merch that is considered limited. Since this film is based heavily on the writing on the walls, we decided to also do our opening credit Over short film writing is on the walls with a bunch of doodles over them which Showcases the brand we created on the Instagram in the film, connecting both of the mediums.  

At the beginning of this project, I ended up doing a lot of research, in film such as the short films Reply by Elle Mills and the movie edge of seventeen by and we took a lot of inspiration especially on what to post to keep audiences engaged from these films. As well as Took inspiration from both of these films for the ending. they both had a hopeful ending but not exactly A happily ever after, which I think we followed suit with our film ending., that even though she didn't end up with the character she liked, she gained confidence and even had a conversation with her crush and Moon started wearing stuff that feels more like her And she got the hang of, finally being able to see herself for who she is. And even though it wasn't what the character wanted from the beginning they got what they needed at the end. Moon like many other coming of age Main characters found herself. We also Took inspiration by putting the characters into character types where the main characters Is a loner while they are in love with the character that is popular that can be seen in a lot of coming-of-age films, as well as we kept the colors. Pretty bright that usually go with these types of films. We also happened to have challenged this convention a lot by not using any dialogue except that the very end, because especially in like coming of age stories they heavily rely on dialogue, but we thought it might be a fun challenge to do this storytelling without words We also challenged The films I researched but not making the romance the central focus of the story and instead of making it as obvious as possible but the central part of the story is the fact that the main character is trying to figure out who she is and that the romance is a side plot as a way to help the main character come to terms with who she is. We thought this would make it more authentic to a real-world situation where you don't always end up with a person you like but most times you end up just having a crush on someone and it doesn't take over your entire day It said just consumes your thoughts.