CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION OF MEDIA STUDIES PORTFOLIO BY ALY ALTAF.

1. Media Studies Project
Critical Reflection by Aly Altaf.

2. How does your product use, or challenge
conventions and how does it represent
social groups or issues?
• The genre of my video is a thriller/suspense
genre, which involves the subject being
kidnapped by a mysterious person.

3. • My video shows a PoV of a person who's identity
is unknown to the viewer, going out of his/her
home. The convention that is challenged in this
very first shot, is that usually in film openings, the
viewer knows who the subject is. In this film
opening, the identity is a mystery, which is a
challenge to the norm in itself.

4. • A convention that is used in my opening scene, is
that of the uncomfortableness that comes with
going out alone at night time in a deserted area.
The camera (which signify the eyes of the
subject) can be seen moving around constantly,
giving the impression that he/she is either
sneaking out of the home (teenager) or scared of
someone following them.

5. • A social issue that is represented in my film
opening, is that of stalking/kidnapping. When the
subject turns around, he/she sees a person
following them, who suddenly starts chasing
him/her. Stalking people, and kidnapping them for
ransom and/or sexual abuse or torture is a very
big problem in our world, and this is shown in my
opening scene.

6. • I'm not aware of any real time movies that might
have followed the same storyline as mine in their
opening scenes.

7. How does your product engage with
audiences, and how would it be distributed
as a real media text?
• If I were to choose a distribution company to help
advertise for my product in the future, I would
choose Lionsgate Studios, as it is known for its
thriller movies and is not part of the big six, but
still has 6.7% market share in the USA film
market. This makes it an affordable, yet well
known company (Minnie-major) that will be able
to distribute my film at an affordable cost with a
reasonable amount of profit.

9. How did your production skills
develop throughout this project?
• From the very beginning of this project, I've been
learning firsthand what it's like to be in a
producer/director's position.
• Firstly, casting is a very difficult job, with so many
people wanting to act, and only one role to give
out. To cast in this video, I chose a friend of mine
who was good in keeping his face
expressionless, and wouldn't mind doing many
retakes of the same shot.

10. • As far as the shooting part was concerned, during
the time length of this project, I was able to learn
a lot about how to make certain impressions on
the viewer about what I wanted as the producer.
This mainly included a trial and error process,
whereby I would shoot a single scene multiple
times until I got the desired shot.

11. • I already knew basic editing before hand, but I
had to kick it up a notch for this project, for which
I took help from the Internet from various sites,
mainly yahoo answers.

12. How did you integrate
technologies in this project?
• I used an Ambico HD camera to shoot my video,
and Windows Movie Maker to edit the shots.
• For posting the video online, I used
www.blogspot.com, a service by Google, to make
my video available to people online.