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Critical Review

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  How does your short film represent social groups or issues? I would not consider addicts to be a social group or marginalized community, but people in addiction and recovery are all over. There is a massive stigma surrounding addiction, and that is an issue. In my short film, I challenge that stigma. When I began writing my script, I wanted my actor playing Jim to be a little older, as I had a preconceived notion that a majority of the people who suffer from addiction would be older, but this turned out to be wrong. I utilized “Addictioncenter.com” to do my research, and it was there that I discovered that people in their early to mid-twenties are the most likely age to suffer from alcoholism. Upon realizing this, I cast my younger brother to play Jim, and although he is physically 13, his youthful look represents the issue that is alcoholism in young people. A lot of people don’t see the younger side of addiction, but it is a very real issue. Another issue I challenge is the stigma
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Short Film Package

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 https://alexrosenblum201.wixsite.com/my-site
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Finishing touches

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 While filming, I had to make a lot of changes. When I wrote the script, I now know I didn't account for a lot. My biggest issue was that I didn't write enough to fill the time, and didn't want to do too little. I added whole scenes into the script mid-production and mostly improvised. Admittedly, I am proud of my quick thinking but I'm not happy it had to be so last minute. I added three big scenes and took one short one out. I also had to change loads of lines. My family wasn't great with lines. Lots of them were similar to what I had scripted, but very few were word for word. That isn't an issue in my eyes, but it is something I wanted to make known. Editing this project was a doozy. I liked using larger shots in terms of length, instead of a ton of short shots. There are a couple of shorter shots but those were easy to edit. In particular, I had trouble with the title cards. I ended up having to leave it in, but there is this weird scroll on almost all of my
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Title Blog

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 Today, I worked on the titles for my short film. I began with brainstorming, where I came down to two ideas. The first was to use poker chips. I would use pictures of a poker table from the internet and affix our names and position to each chip. SO I followed through with the plan and I had one issue. It was only about 20 seconds of time because there were so many poker chips on the table. Combined with my actual footage, it stood in at about 4:20, which wasn't quite enough. I stretched it out a little, and did some creative reworking, but it never worked. So, I began with my other idea: use cards. I went online and picked a bunch of cards, trying to keep their visuals similar but not from the same deck. I used various decks to symbolize how frequently and widespread Jim's gambling issue was. He was gambling all over, and I wanted to show this from the very start, as I can't bring my 13-year-old brother into a casino. So I began: I use a handful of cards. For my studio, I
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Dying of laughter and impatience

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 To make this movie work, I had to utilize some help from those in my life closest to me: My mom and my brother. I am very close with both of these people, so filming with them was challenging in the best way possible. It was a nonstop stream of laughter and new memories. This came at the detriment of taking 30 minutes to shoot a 45-second scene. This is one example of how having fun can be a party pooper. Another massive issue was my access to shooting locations. I had to shoot this film around my house. People live in my house. That being said, this was really annoying. There was also the issue of my dog. She adores my mom and hardly leaves her side. My mom played one of the two main characters and I had no intention of the therapist having a dog. I had to chase the dog around the house a bunch, had to put her outside for a few minutes, then she started barking so I had to let her in. It was a dog-day afternoon for sure. I had a lot of fun filming this year. It was really nice to wor
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Picking a software Pt. 2

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  At this point, all I have left of this project to do is edit. I am at another fork (4-pronged to be specific), as I was with my postcard software. I did some research and found four possible software: iMovie, PowerDirector, DaVinci Resolve, and Vimeo Create. I had to focus and weigh the pros and cons of making movies with iMovie, Davinci Resolve, Vimeo Create, and PowerDirector. Vimeo Create: Pros: Vimeo Create is simple to use. It provides a large selection of templates and presets to pick from. Editing seems really straightforward, with tools for stuff like chopping, dividing, incorporating audio and visual effects, and modifying color. Cons: It lacks a lot of customization, such as the capacity to design unique transitions and effects. A lot of people say that upload speeds are so slow, they can take DAYS. The free edition offers few features. If I Don't pay, I need to have a watermark in the middle. PowerDirector:  Pros: PowerDirector seems easy to use going by online reviews
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Designing a flyer

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 As decided in my last blog, I will be using Canva to design my flyer. I found canva to be incredibly easy to use. The interface is the perfect amount of drag and drops to please me. They also have some great pre-made templates. I found one that I liked through their template search, where I looked up a movie coming soon and used what I found there. I found that Canva had hundreds of thousands if not millions of options to choose from. This actually proved to be challenging, because, with the other sites, I didn't have enough. With canva, I had way too much to choose from. This turned a 15-minute design process into a 90-minute internal back and forth. I decided to color the background black, which would contrast the white and yellow/gold text I would use. The font selection provided me with hundreds of fonts to choose from. I use four fonts in my poster: Raleway, Raleway Heavy, Canva Sans, and Mr. Dafoe. As for the colors, I had the option to go with something they call "Docu
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