Film Opening Project (blog 26)

In blog 20, I did some research about representation and our target audience for our opening, and the things that I noted are really useful for answering questions one and two. I feel that it's quite obvious that our film opening challenges the conventions of social media, and it represents the issue of perceptions versus reality/the dangers of involving yourself within social media apps (specifically Instagram).

Because our opening is based off the story of Essena O'Neil, I want to source her experience as the reason why we chose to center our story around social media, and to also cite her experience on how our opening represents various social groups. Our opening primarily focused on shedding light on women (either influencers or consumers) who use social media, specifically on Instagram. Going off on a couple of statistics and social media demographics, it is reported that women use social media apps like Instagram more often than men do, thus supporting why we chose to have a female protagonist.

Here is a chart I found on sproutsocial.com

Age is also another thing we considered. Because younger audiences tend to be more engaged in social media more that older audiences, it was important that our character fitted that mold. Obviously, it wouldn't make sense if we chose a senior to play our character of a social media influencer.

Going back on some of shorts that I found on social media such as A Social Life by Kerith Lemon, I feel that the best way to distribute our film would be through Youtube. According to an article that I found on filmshortage.com, Youtube is a better platform in comparison to Vimeo as it can help me reach more audiences. The whole purpose of my film is spread a message, so logically it makes more sense to post it on Youtube (however, if I were hypothetically posting this, I would post my film on both platforms).

As you can see, the information that I'll be collecting is definitely going to pile up quite a bit. Because of this, I decided to make a Google Doc of a Draft I'll be using to help organize information for the script. Hopefully this will help me out write a script in time before filming and everything.

I'm moving along, I can't wait until I get to start writing the script! I'll keep you guys posted :)

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/new-social-media-demographics/
https://www.quicksprout.com/who-is-more-active-on-social-media-men-or-women/
https://filmshortage.com/youtube-vs-vimeo/