SELF CRITICAL REFLECTION - COMP 1

SELF-CRITICAL REFLECTION                                    AS LEVEL MEDIA STUDIES

This is my self-critical reflection as it was written by me

My group comprises three students from the Media Studies grade 11 class; Theo Chandra, Satriana Budhi, and Naysha Sera. We decided to do production onward the film's opening, “The Guy Upstairs,” within the genre of Thriller, Horror, and Mystery, given time 2 minutes. The synopsis of the opening film would be a high school teenage girl living in an apartment and noticing her neighbor upstairs because of his unusual behavior. The film's opening starts with the daily life of an adolescent girl; this ability gives more view of the audience of student’s life. By that, it will keep the mystery of the intention of thriller and horror until the end of the film opening; hence it would engage the audience to predict the subsequent excitement of the film. 

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

We’ve been through many struggles as a team, as we divided our tasks to make production faster and more productive for our group. The genre we picked at the beginning was Romance, Comedy, and Slice of Life; we changed plans since, in our own opinion, Romance was not really into our movie style and did not engage much for the audience. This may have preferred reading towards the audience, as our targeted market audience should be teenagers that the excitement of the genre itself would engage. The genre theory applied here categorizes different structural elements and patterns that the component can find in collections of stories. The sense of horror and thriller represented here as the stalker and psycho person that has their imagination of the world; therefore, set a confident expectation of the color gradient from the result of the scene. Our film opening will consist of two types of social groups represented: the stereotype of teenagers and psycho. Stereotyping is a cognitive process that involves associating a characteristic with a group. Still, it can also apply, lead to, or serve to justify an affective reaction toward people from other groups by Walter Lippmann in 1992. In less than a month, we researched based on what we all liked, so we chose romance because we thought it could be easier to create the line story. We watch most Korean films to learn the romance genre's storyline, such as 20th Century Girl from Netflix's original film in 2022. Since the film's main character is similar to our own, in which most of the plot is the same. 

How does your product engage with audiences, and how would it be distributed as an actual media text?

The film opening that we created, as the base of the film, targeted teenagers to young adults. The film opening or the film may not target mainly older people, as this is a thriller and horror (mystery) film. Therefore we chose thriller as nowadays people want to watch something scary. The most famous or watched films that engage most teenagers are thriller and horror movies; besides that, it's easier to create a big idea. As horror movies may seem more fun to watch as they build the suspension to terrify us using suspense and dread, built on the intimacy and psychological terror of the heroine; different from the romance genre since they're easy to predict, and most of the storyline remains the same. Connecting our media with our audience by describing the character may help the audience understand the background story, which may create a specific image from a different point of view of the characters. Another to build a relationship with the audience is by showing the main problem or event to the audience. Hence this may pique the audience's excitement. As a film opening my idea to make the audience interact with our media is by maybe giving some puzzle game, this may engage people to watch the movie as it also interacts with the audience engagement. 

Distributed as an actual media text?

We set our target audience from teenagers to young adults. Therefore we might be marketed on social media through many platforms, such as Instragam, Tiktok, Twitter, and Youtube. We could promote it through radio and podcasts talking about the specific movie.