Tai's eyes: April 2024

So for this project we had our ups and downs but ultimately I think we did good with what we made. When thinking of the concept we wanted to spread awareness on an issue that specifically targets our audience. We chose depression as it's become a very prominent issue for youth nowadays and we wanted to do something that would have an impact on our audience and to bring awareness. The premise of the "film" would be that the story or our character would be narrated from the perspective of their suicide note. We went the route that at the end of the “film” the main character who struggles through the majority of the film, ends up taking their own life, through the film it shows how you wouldn't always tell what someone is going through. We wanted the audience to feel what the main character is going through and connect with them. to emphasize that we ended up hinting at the two characters having feelings for each other which makes the closeness that much more devastating. We wanted the audience to feel everything that the characters were feeling so in our shots we tried to get as intimate as we could without it being weird. Everyone's lost someone so we all understand that feeling of grief and the struggles with it but others struggle more than some so we wanted to bring awareness to the suffering of grief and the depression. We chose the story to be narrated through the perspective of the characters suicide note because it's showing the story of their life. before they chose to make this choice. Almost like a “they missed all the signs and this is what happened to me”. just to slightly alarm everyone to take more of an action towards the issue.

The title “A letter to my mom” was meant to kind of act as a part of a suicide note. The idea initially was to have the mom be the one who passed away but we instead went with a close friend passing and having the character be close to her mother hence writing the suicide note to her mom. In the note she would be exposing her thoughts and thought process to her mom which would end up being the narration through the film. In the trailer the beginnings of her note are read out to have an ominous feeling and then jumps to a happy song showing a happy life which is meant to create a sense of how quickly life changes for the main character. We want to emphasize the drastic changes in our characters' lives to show how quickly things change and the toll that depression has on an individual. We really tried to stick close to the letter when posting and in our thumbnails. For example the movie is more sad so the color tones would be super cold and like blue or muted colors. But also some warm but stale colors. Not too saturated but more muted and leaning towards a lower contrast. But we wanted to start the trailers warmer or more saturated to show that everything is great and have the end be colder. Also, a lot of teenage movie trailers show a lot of interaction between a few characters: a trusted adult, a friend group, and parents are the common ones I found. Given that our film is centered around teenage suicide we decided to show how they interact with their friends rather than their parents. We all trust our parents but telling them something so upsetting and sad is not something we want to do.

Our products engage with the audience by showing the intimacy between the characters in our thumbnails and our poster. the colors, the photos and the title including all of that leads to suspense which makes it engaging to our audience. I used reference posters from “Drama girl” and “Never let me go'' to help give me an idea on how to execute the posters. Not revealing too much but engaging enough to pull our audience in. with fewer words on our posters the more the audience would be drawn into the image itself and therefore more curious as to what the production is about. I also looked at the thumbnails for 13 reasons why as the concept of our film is similar and it included both main characters in the poster. Since we are doing a limited theatrical release the poster sales would be limited as well so they could only be given out at certain times. Same with how the sales of a popcorn bucket would go. The demand for them would be up so the sales would increase. On our social media we've posted many little things to engage our audience. We have a post of the two characters hanging out in black and white saying “friendships are a powerful thing”...EXCITINGGGG. We really don't want to make the film seem super happy, go lucky, we want to make sure we add that detail of being ominous so everything we do or post is very much half and half.

Our products don't challenge conventions too much but normally streaming platforms don't show the thumbnails to their newer films prior to its release like how it'd be shown on the platform which we did. A Marketing tool I learned was to BOMBARD THE AUDIENCE. a lot of big-name companies just bombard their audience to get them intrigued. Also we did the behind the scenes videos and all before the release of the film which is usually done after the gold release to gain more traction. But the concept of our film definitely challenges conventions. Given that we intend to basically kill off the main character, it's not a common thing done in the industry because you can't have a story without the main character acting. The only way most people would execute something like this would be to have the characters story told by someone else and we wanted to get up close and personal.