Well thank you for accompanying me in this long process, I loved sharing my progress with you and hope to see you soon! I hope you like our project as much as I did, I’m really proud of all the hard work we put into it so without further ado here is the link to our final project and Instagram !
Thank you!,
People love sports, whether it is watching them or doing them recreationally or professionally. Our short film ‘Reaching the Bar’ goes through that mental battle of not knowing how to let go of something that once upon a time it brought you joy. Our short film explores the mental impacts that sports have on you. We chose the sport of gymnastics because it is one of the most mentally challenging sports, comparing everything about yourself from a young age.
We had a hard time deciding what our short film was going to
be about but when we finally landed on an idea; we knew that the first thing to
do was research. To start with, we researched some sports drama short films
since that is what we were focusing on. Short films such as Game Night” by Joel
Fendelman, “LIGA” by Toby’s Sport, and “good sport” were analyzed deeply to get
the most inspiration out of them, and while studying these films one of the
things that they had in common was that they are incredibly emotional, and they
will make you feel something as you are watching. Moreover, the shots used for
each film were very authentic to show the authenticity of the sport. Therefore,
to achieve and be successful in this sports drama short film we had to really
show the different kinds of emotions that playing a sport brings you, whether
that is joy, frustration, anger, or sadness. (Research
short film blogs)
While conducting the research necessary to make this
production is long and time-consuming, it is incredibly important to
accomplish. So not only did we research short films, but we also researched
some gymnastics movies such as ‘Stick It’ (2006) and ‘Full Out’ (2015). From
analyzing these films, we got some viewpoints on how to accomplish some
authentic shots of gymnastics.
The sequence of the video from ‘Full Out’ and the way the
shots are put together demonstrates how quick gymnastics really is, to the
point where it is hard to watch because there is so much going on which was
something we wanted to accomplish on our film, as well as, the sequence from
‘Stick it’ falling over and over because the sport is really about failing over
and over again until you get it right, therefore, they are both an accurate
demonstration and representation of the sport which is why it was necessary to
show some kind of those sequences.
The genre of our short film ‘Reaching the Bar’ is a sports drama,
in which the plot is about growing up in the sport you love, nevertheless, as
time passes it becomes a mental struggle every day as the main character starts
comparing herself to others and starts to ponder why she isn’t good enough.
While conducting our research for the genre I came across the sports drama
conventions in which it adds drama to a sports storyline, in addition to it
tends to capture the more intense aspects of the sporting world which is
exactly what we did. In our film, we showed how gymnastics can be incredibly
deteriorating for your mental health even though it can bring us amusement
sometimes. Nonetheless, we were adamant about incorporating the sports drama
conventions. (Research)
Just as research is an important part of filmmaking so is targeting the audience since they are the ones that will be watching the film. Due to the
fact that our film is about sports and our main character is a female, we
thought that the best target audience for our film was teenage girls to be
specific but any teenager really because this is the stage when everything gets
serious and the sport you once did as a fun activity is now on that increases
the pressure of your performance which can cause some stress. Moreover, the
short film is something that most teenagers would be able to relate to it and realize
that they are not alone in whatever they are going through with their
respective sports. Because our protagonist is a female gymnast, the short film is
strongly targeted to the many gymnasts that have gone through this mental
battle when you do the sport because gymnastics is not a team sport, you are
completely alone trying to deal with the different kinds of emotion that the
sports bring out. And because it is not a team sport, it leaves you comparing
yourself to your teammates wondering why you can’t do the same things they can
or why your teammate might be at a higher level and they’re not; it is mentally
deteriorating. Consequently, we would also love for adults to watch this film
so they can grasp an understanding of what their kids might be going through
with the sport they are playing and have a little more understanding as to why
sometimes leaving the sport is the right answer.
For our brand, you can see that we kept it cohesive throughout
the entirety of our project. Nonetheless, the brand that we are trying to
achieve is that over time a sport can become something that you dislike doing. The
message we are trying to pass along is that sometimes it is okay to quit
something that it is not bringing you joy anymore but instead, is causing you
some mental issues. A lot of times we think that giving up something we
once loved, but is causing us pain it’s the end of the world but in reality
it's not, it is okay; it takes a lot of courage to make that decision but that
is exactly what we want to communicate with our brand; we want to give all the
little girls watching the film courage to leave whatever it is causing them to
be hurt. The way we show this to our audience in our film is that as the
character grows older, she becomes more critical of herself causing her to
have mental struggles.
In our film, we can make a connection with a persistent issue
today which is mental health and struggles. The main character of our film keeps
all her feelings to herself and all her mental struggles which make her mental
health deteriorate. In the sports world, this is something that happens every
time because it is a common difficulty because of the constant pressure athletes
put on themselves. As the film progresses there is a constant sense of
jealousy and a decrease of self-esteem. In addition to that, there is also a
social issue that in the world of gymnastics sometimes being an African American
gymnast means that you have an immense amount of talent which is not true in
every case, therefore, our film works to break that stereotype placed in the
world of gymnastics as well. Finally, our short film works together to show a
social issue and break another one at the same time.
Well, my friends this is the last week, our project is due tomorrow and we just about done. All we have been doing since last week is editing and we kinda split the work that way we can get it done faster. Nonetheless, as we are editing it we realized that we are running a little short on time so now we are brainstorming to see what we could add from the footage that we already had since we had 101 videos LOL.
On another note, I got the part of doing the credits for the project and I got it done yesterday, nonetheless, I got a little stuck because I didn't know if I wanted to use the smoke effect or the typewriter effect. We decided to place the credits over some bloopers we got to make it fun and entertaining!
This is what the smoke effect looked like. 
When I showed my group mates I realized that it needs to be a little longer because they are going way too fast to the point where you can barely read them so I have to adjust that as well.
Well, that's it!! Next time we meet you are going to have the final project on your hands!
So we now have 12 post on our Instagram and a couple of story highlights. Here see…
See! I think it looks great, I think we kept a cohesive theme going on throughout the whole social media page that goes very well with the film. We posted a couple of behind the scenes footage, videos of the “actresses” having fun on “set” the day of filming and a couple of just general gymnastics videos with captions that explain little things about gymnastics to educate the people that don’t know anything about it. We also posted a little postcard to tell the people where the movie is going to be and when it’s coming out. And look! film festival liked a couple of our post as well! We we’re very excited about this.
See!!! it’s pretty legit, we don’t know how they found our page but they started following us and they liked our post so it was pretty exciting g to say the least. But anyways, just wanted to update you on how the Instagram is going and I think we’re doing a pretty good job on it, I still think we need a few more posts but we have time to post still. Now, the next thing I have to do is my critical reflection because that is due the same day as well.
After my last blog post I tried editing with the “clip champ” app from my computer but it didn’t work, it looked like cut out and choppy. So then I tried Adobe but two things; one my editing skills don’t go that far and two my computer hates adobe because ur crashes everytimeeee so I would have to use my sisters computer to edit. But that’s not the point, on Wednesday in class, Ana brought her computer and for some reason adobe works for her so we started editing and we realized a few things. One do them was that there was a problem with continuity because in some clips the girls had different leo’s and it was gonna mess up the continuity of the film. We also realized that we may need more footage just to add some more B-roll. But nonetheless, we started editing just to get ahead because this is due Thrusday so we have to get going.
Here is a us editing in class having a complete blast!
Later that day I went to the gym to practice and get the film and because we are lucky people it turns out that the girls that we used decided to wear the same leo that we had already recorded them in! So it worked out great because instead of redoing the whole segment I only had to redo one shot so it was a pretty good day to say the least. Now we just have to keep editing and finish the short film! i’m very excited and I hope it turns out good and everybody enjoys it as well.
SEE YOU SOON!
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