The Slicer Critical Reflection

 The Slicer Critical Reflection

How do your products represent social groups or issues?

When thinking about what kind of movie my group mates and I wanted to make we knew we wanted it to apply to and reach a large group of people. In our movie, we hope to bring together thriller and horror lovers, teenagers, and people who have been affected by murders. My entire group is interested in crime-solving and mysteries so right from the start we knew we wanted to make a film of our own with this kind of storyline. Thriller movies are usually a hit or miss amongst people and that’s why we wanted to include other factors to bring in those people who usually aren’t drawn to these types of films. We wanted to bring awareness to murder and the dangers of being a teenager in the modern-day. Being teenagers ourselves, we wanted to combine our interests with our knowledge to make a film we were proud of. As 2/3 of our group is female and lives in a large city, we experience several dangers on the daily basis and have to walk around scared when we happen to be alone. We wanted to bring awareness and create a voice for others our age and to be able to represent the things we have to think about and deal with. Situations, like the one we created in our movie, has happened in our area before and we are well aware that the world is much bigger than our town and that things like that happen in different places all the time as well.

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

In addition to our film, we had to create a website and several social media. We created a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to post about and reach a larger audience. As most teenagers do, we use social media on a daily basis and know the impact it could have on films and other projects. We wanted to be active and post about our film on social media in order to reach a greater audience and for it to get noticed overall. Nowadays social media is the way to find out about most things going on in the world and what is being released. We ended up using Instagram the most because it is the app, we all use the most and have found would be the most beneficial to our film and its growth. We started posting and gaining a following which we were hoping for. The social media were a way to spread awareness of the film and to gain an audience, the website was to give more information about the film and the inside workings of it, and then there was the film that we created. They all work together to get the best possible outcome for our film and for it to do as good as possible. Since our group basically grew up with social media and have seen it evolve, we know the importance of it in the film and entertainment industry and we knew we needed to do the same in order for ours to be successful.

How do your products engage with the audience?

Our film raises awareness of how dangerous life as a teenager can be and how things could end if they are not careful enough. We have seen and know how teenagers, especially girls, get treated on the streets of big cities and we wanted to spread the word to further inform others. It is an issue that hits close to home and something that we deal with ourselves. We wanted to connect with our audience on a personal level and be able to have them relate to us and our film. We posted behind the scene pictures on our Instagram to get the audience and fans to feel like they have been involved since the start. When we post on Instagram we try and interact with our followers and comment back as much as possible. We want them to feel as close to the cast and movie as possible when watching the film. We wanted to create a bond with the people who have seen and experienced similar situations as us and for it to show the world that it happens more than they expect. It is something we realized needed to get attention and have attention brought to and we couldn’t think of a better way to do it than a film. We especially thought a film would be a good choice since COVID-19 is still around and keeping everyone inside. We decided that the film would be distributed on YouTube so that the audience can be safe at home while enjoying this new movie. We practiced all the precautions needed to make the movie safely and to give our audience a good image of us being careful and thoughtful.

How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?

We had already decided to go with the thriller genre before we even decided on what the plot of our movie would be. The people in our group enjoy watching thrillers and we realized that this would be the easiest for us to film and come up with a story for. As a group, we still decided to research the genre to make sure it was the one we wanted to go with and that we fully understood the meaning before committing to it. We came up with the idea for The Slicer and it follows the conventions of the thriller genre. We used a lot of suspense and keeping the audience on their toes throughout the film. We tried keeping the suspense up with matching non-copyrighted music to fit the genre. Most movies that are similar to the ones we created are usually seen as thrillers, mystery, or horror which can all be seen throughout our movie. We wanted to have a good variety of all three because they are all correlated to create movies like the one, we did. We used the most thriller and it seemed to be the fittest, so we ultimately decided to identify it as a thriller. Throughout the filming and editing of the movie, we would change certain scenes or add certain music or transitions in order to try and fit it in the thriller genre as well as we could. Looking back at the movie we did a good job when comparing it to other movies seen within the same genre.