clash royale (critical reflection!)

For this year’s Cambridge Portfolio Project, myself and my team, Joaquin and Andrew, decided to go on and make the kookiest, unconventional short film of all time. We had very ambitious ideas from the start and wanted nothing but to tell a story that would not only be important to us but impact those who watch it, more in a comedic way than profound.

 

I’d say for sure that our original idea which was having our main character, Otto, smoke weed as a fuel of power from the devil himself and then end up killing her girlfriend was WAY out of bounds of what I wanted to create. It was out there, which I liked, but at the same time I thought it was just way too much not only for myself to enjoy producing, but for us to execute well as a whole. Not all of us were comfortable with the idea, and it was made obvious, but luckily after a couple days of researching some media texts that shared our same genre of dark comedy, we came back and upgraded our story to be much less intense with no killing of lovers involved! 

When coming up with ideas for The Scourge and developing its aesthetic and overall tone, research definitely played a really big role in solidifying what exactly I wanted within all of those things. Researching media texts sharing our same genre also helped us a ton with understanding dark comedy a lot better! We learned the basics of the genre, its conventions, and how to execute it well, especially since our short tackles the sensitive topic of religion and power struggle, we really wanted to know how to do this right without being downright offensive.

 
The productions that my team and I took most inspiration from were The Amazing Digital Circus, The Binding of Issac, and Dan Da Dan. There were many more but those are the 3 that were the most important to myself, Joaquin, and Andrew. Through our research, we learned that dark comedy combines elements of humor and tragedy and or darker themes. As said by IMDb, the genre often also touches on taboo topics like death, crime, dysfunction, and societal issues all while being super silly to spark some contrast in an amusing way. Dark comedies are to be handled carefully, as not doing so would take away from the meaning that is attempting to be conveyed. Taking that all into consideration, we then looked at specific media texts that fall under the dark comedy genre. All these texts focus on heavy subject matters while having a silly exterior. 

My personal research mostly focused on The Amazing Digital Circus and how it dives into serious topic matters while also still maintaining a silly tone (most of the time). I was really interested in how the show handled Caine's character (the AI ringleader antagonist). It first introduces him as a goofy, happy go lucky guy who wants nothing but to entertain the circus members, to making him go insane and begin torturing each and every single one of them in different ways, the most significant being with their traumas. For Annie's character, I took inspiration from Caine's personality and aimed to make him go down the path of increasing insanity. The difference between Annie and Caine though is that Annie is PURE EVIL while Caine turned bad solely because he was malfunctioning due to not fulfilling his AI purposes well. Annie isn't an AI, he's the devil! 

Other media texts that were significant in the development of our film as mentioned before were The Binding of Isaac, mainly researched by Joaquin, and Dan Da Dan, researched by myself and Andrew.

The Binding of Issac touches on religious themes while not being afraid to pull any punches as Issac is literally being traumatized by religion throughout the entire game. Joaquin took this as inspiration and as a result we ended up with an insane product touching on religious subject matter with Biblical references like Cain and Able, The Golden Calf, and The Binding of Isaac. We wanted to make our film a sort of an uncomfortable but yet amusing watch, similar to how The Binding of Isaac video game did it. 

This is sort of similar to how we also took inspiration from Dan Da Dan with the goofy, yet uncomfortable amusing tone. The anime also isn't afraid to pull any punches, especially the visual ones (ghghhhg). I mainly took inspiration from Dan Da Dan for the general vibe and aesthetic of our short film. I wanted our brand to be goofy while also making it quite ominous with the way we interact with audiences along with the color palette and all. I admire how incredibly weird Dan Da Dan is, so I really wanted to take away something significant out of it and do my best in making our short film a literal embodiment of all our weirdness, Joaquin, Andrew, and I!

Along with us, our target audience are also pretty unconventional. The Scourge mainly engages with audiences through its visual humor, snappy pacing, and general vibe and aesthetic. Our target audience consists of predominately young individuals that are fans of dark humor who fall under the alternative and queer categories. They are also mostly Americans who fall under the middle/upper middle classes with income, as our film is in English (lol required) and takes place in during the 2000s in suburbia south Florida.

 As for our social media, target audiences are mostly engaged through the way we interact with them along with the aesthetic that we brand our film around. We used Instagram as we knew our target audience would be in the younger age range. Each one of my posts have a consistent, cohesive color palette that draw in members of our audience who are fans of art along with the ominous, occult vibe. Along with my page's color palette, it also maintains a unique brand through the font used consistently throughout. The font I've been using for each post is called Ghastly Panic and it does the job perfectly in making them stand out and setting up the tone for our film, both silly and goofy with a spice of profoundness and seriousness!

 For the print component, our postcard maintains the brand I developed with the social media and our final film through implementing the same black and red aesthetic and similar fonts, which once more stands out to those in our target audience interested in our production's artistic direction and general vibe. Initially, we planned having our postcard look very similar to the one see in our final film as Annie gives he "card" to Otto after she makes the deal, the only difference being that we made the title of our film the largest text on the front of it.  We wanted to have a nice little call back from our film's narrative to engage better with audiences and make them go all like "woahhh that's the thing we saw in the movie that's so cool! woah!! these guys are so awesome!!"After being close to completion of post production tho, we decided to scrap this postcard as the shot where Annie gives Otto his card is way too long and we didn't want to go beyond 9 minutes. 

Now we made a new postcard and it looks pretty sick and engages with audiences wonderfully! It doesn't really look similar to our initial postcard but I think it's better that way because that allowed for much better visual engagement + better audience reception once we posted it on our social media. The inclusion of the important characters in our piece does a good job in reeling in audiences, especially those who are familiar with the individuals playing certain parts, like Isa with Mable! Some of the people from my school's band follows our social media and it has been made clear through their positive reception of Isa and Emi content, that they are looking forward to how we do with our roles in the final film! Along with the characters, we also engage with our audiences through the incorporation of a fun little (fake) QR code that will provide them with all the information they need about The Scourge's screening at AAHSFF.

Front and back of our postcard (made by urs truly ;D)

I am actually so proud of this postcard because of just how much care, precision, and feedback went into it :] This really looks so sick and fits the brand of our film beautifully!

Our short film itself especially engages with our strange peculiar target audience with an almost non sensical plot filled with power hunger, punk ass rock music in the beginning and the end, animated + hand drawn special effects, and a gritty, guerrilla filmmaking style. Also the jokes :D My parents were the first outside viewers of my film and what they liked most were the jokes :D They were all pretty funny :D One thing though that may disengage the audience from our final film would be the audio. We used lavalier mics connected to a phone and at some moments the audio came out a little too quiet. It isn't the worst audio in the entire world but it could have used some work so viewers could understand important plot points, especially when Otto makes the deal with Annie, better. Apart from that though, the rest of our film draws in audiences with its pure absurdity which I'm truly quite proud of!

a really cool shot at the end of our film that does amazing with engagement :]

SPEAKING OF BRANDING!

I was the one responsible for our projects branding, mostly with the social media and the postcard! As briefly mentioned before, our brand relies on dark, warm colors like reds, blacks, oranges, and some yellows here and there. The font we consistently used was called Ghastly Panic and it did a great job in adding a lot of flavor to our project's name, The Scourge. We aimed for using a font that looked hand drawn and carved since most of our branding has sharp elements like triangles and such that add to the gritty feeling of it all. This branding was specifically brought out the most within our social media page that I ran! Each and every single one of my postings embraced the color palette that we developed along with using the Ghastly Panic font and adding a bit of grain to each in order to create the gritty feeling that we also developed within our short film!

There were also some posts in my page that had the pictures all black and white, which I definitely thinks fits our brand a lot better. Looking back, I think for every single post that I made, having at least the covers be black and white would have created a stronger brand that'd be more recognizable. What really made me notice this was the development of our postcard. I initially had each character on both sides of the card be in full color but after sending it to my group for feedback, Joaquin and Andrew both in fact agreed that it would look miles better and fit the brand more if it was in black and white. After taking their feedback and making the postcard black and white, I was so pleasantly surprised by how much better that approach looked. Had my entire social media page been black and white with a lot of red and black along with it, it would have stood out a lot more, but I'm still really satisfied with it so it's okay :D

first draft of postcard in color 

second draft of postcard in black n white (MUCH BETTER)!

As for the branding of our video component, I think it could have been done a bit better. In the end, Joaquin and I decided to progressively make the colors in our movie darker and darker as it gets more intense and near the insane ending to really bring it out and just make said finale unforgettable. And I do have to say, we did pretty awesome in bringing out the finale and will forever say that it is my favorite part in the entire film cause it was just so hilariously gnarly! Howeeverrr, even though we decided against it, part of me wishes the entire film could have been like the finale, or maybe if the finale was a bit longer, our entire piece as a whole could have aligned with the brand's color palette a tad better.

Having the entirety of The Scourge take place only at night though would have taken a bit away from the progression of Otto's insanity and such so I'm glad we didn't end up doing that but just having the entire film with the finale's color palette would have been 2000x cooler. Again though, this is just a me thing. When it comes to branding and colors and such, I want nothing but to keep everything nice and consistent but obviously having our entire film take place at night would have been very hard to do. We also used the Ghastly Panic font a whole ton within our video component to keep that brand identity developed both in the postcard and social media and I'm really glad we did that, because even though the beginning was all nice and blue, we still used it and looked pretty good :] 

love this shot :]

Beginning title card!

Ending title card!

As for representation, we created The Scourge with the intention of not only being super duper funny, kooky, and wacky, but also to comment a little bit on religious power struggles and how ridiculous going through a whole ton just for that can be. We represent the goals of those who have the hunger for power and would stop at nothing to get it as worthless. Although I would have loved to have more time to develop her story better in our final film, throughout our piece, Otto goes through some really crazy stuff all in the name of self gain and power for herself. She argues with her sister for a little bit, gets her nose broken by a priest, accidentally runs an innocent passerby over, shoots Issac, and ultimately kills her very own sister in the end.

 
By then, Otto is long gone and her soul completely belongs to the devil, with only some humanity and "what the helly did I just do" left in her as she's looking down at the portal. Despite all the silly and goofy elements of our production, there is still some tragedy in it, and that is the loss of Otto's soul to power struggle. Obviously how we portray this real life issue is not realistic in anyway whatsoever, but such an exaggerated statement, even if not fully developed in our case (rip 10 minutes), can make a powerful statement if understood correctly.

 
Had we had a bit more development on Otto's loss, I think the statement we were trying to go for here could have been a tad more impactful. But the fact that she gets progressively worse and worse as the film goes on is pretty clear :] Making a film basing off of the sensitive topic of religion was really no easy feat, especially for myself, a Catholic. We changed a whole lot of things that would cross potential lines for some viewers and to make the story we were trying to tell a bit clearer. This film is more so anti-religious in the way of saying that joining religion for power and self gain is bad, essspecciallly if it involves the devil. Our short can be interpreted in many different ways, but a critique of power struggles and getting into some deep dangerous stuff for virtually nothing is what we were going for. 

After analyzing our piece and reflecting on it a whole ton, I can admit I had many many doubts going into this and going out of this. Like I stated in my reflection blog post, the expectations I set for myself are INCREDIBLY high, and even though I'm working on being kinder to myself in regards to that, it seriously has been bringing me down throughout the entirety of this project. This time, I'm not working with filmmaking pros, and this time I'm not being absolutely carried.

As much as I adored it, last years Portfolio Project only had a bit of myself etched into it. This year's production is different. Even though it isn't as jaw dropping visually and such, it is still an amazing reflection of myself, Joaquin, and Andrew, both our personalities, and this current time of our lives. I contributed A LOT this time around, from revising the screenplay, to doing the line edit, to taking on the social media and postcard components. Even though we were carried a bit by Joaquin and their experience + skills, this piece just feels so raw and true to myself and I could not love it more for that. Sure, there are SO many things to improve, but I'm pretty proud of what we ended up with :] The gritty, guerrilla, alternative look is definitely what we were going for and it came out awesome :D

 I'm looking to pursue media production in my future, and The Scourge is now considered to be my first ever short film! It's gonna be pretty cool like 20 years into the future when I'm super cool and awesome and super experienced with media production and filmmaking, looking back at the silly goofy wacky short film I made when I was 17 years old and realizing just how far I've come. I'm proud to say that The Scourge is my first step into my media production life, and I am so excited with what else I'll create in the future! I have learned SO much about filmmaking, it's honest difficulties, and fostered new friendships, and for that, I could not be anymore grateful right now. 

I hope you guys enjoy and get a good laugh out of The Scourge, my first ever honest, raw, piece of Emi slop :]