Aice Media Studies

  Critical Reflection Due January 31, 2022 on your portfolio   Here are the four Critical Reflection questions. Remember that each question should have roughly 250 words. Also, do not look at this as one giant essay. This should be divided into the following questions:   • How do your products represent social groups or issues? Our key message exemplifies the development of the opioid  crisis and how our main character Paola  handles that. She struggles heavily with substance abuse and is depicted as someone who can't live  without it. Her young age didn't allow her to fully grasp the idea of her addiction. Or how it will  continue to affect her life.  The reliance she had on her prescription opioids lasted far beyond her  physical need for them. Without them, she is seen depressed, enraged, and consumed with anxiety.  Paola's mental health was another social issue we wanted to depict. You never see how she  was before the accident but by the reaction of her mother and her

Towards the end of our production, the only scenes we had left to film were the most important. Finally, when putting all the scenes together, we realized there were some we wanted to recreate. We always do this. once we finish we go back and make sure there isn't something we want to recreate. The next step in this production project was the marking perspective. We're required to create a postcard and a website advertising our film. As well as social media accounts of our film. We created the postcard easily first off. It didn't even take us 45mins. We put all the necessary elements in and we worked with our creativity. The next step was creating social media accounts. Some we're a bit hard for me to figure out because I've never used the platform before. It just turned into something you just have to figure out. Facebook and Twitter turned out to be the hardest for me. I believe facebook just kept my actual name somewhere on the account because it wouldn't let

After every filming day, we put all our shots together to see what we need. And how long all our other things need to take. Alexa owns a MacBook and uses it to edit. She is very talented at editing. She is a very motivated person. She genuinely enjoys editing on her own time. We'll have little study dates on days we're not filming. We'll just sit and work on the project. Bouncing ideas back fourth during editing. During school, we'd occasionally meet up to work on the project together. I would go to her study hall and help her edit. When filming, I struggled with laughing on important takes. Like the ambulance and throwing up scene. They were both scenes that we couldn't re-shoot. The ambulance scene was very long and the bell was about to ring for the next period. And during the throwing up scene, there was no way we were going to do that again. After that scene everything was full of fake vomit so we'd have to clean everything up and do it all over again. And

 This project was honestly so fun! Alexa and I always end up enjoying ourselves throughout it. Alexa loves to film and edit. She's very talented as well! So we already knew that I was going to be acting in it. When deciding our pitch, we wanted it to be a girl our age with scenes we could actually execute. So we were thinking were thinking very realistically. I've always enjoyed acting, but I don't think I'd ever pursue it. I want the effort to really be shown, rather than barely try and have it come out sloppy and childish. We both came up with idea. I researched the symptoms and withdrawal of opioids and that epidemic in general. Since I'm in Mr. Evans class he assisted me in researching the protocol to administering any type of pain medicine. I organized the the ambulance scene with Mr. Evans at least 3 weeks in advance. Doing the markup for that scene was definitely a learning process. I never worked with the skin wax before. I took on the task of the storyboard

When filming there were so many little things we needed to keep note of. Such as what outfits I was wearing the other day of filming. Making sure my makeup was always on the same way. As well as having the makeup fade throughout the time of the film, to portray the physical damage healing, but the psychological and mental impact still weighing heavy. In the scene where the nurse is rolling me out of the hospital, we made sure we were perfect. From the location, the costumes, the props, the background, and the angles. As well as the ambulance scene, our attention to detail was honestly impeccable. Our paramedic 2 Alexander Cabrera was wearing slides during the ambulance scene. The first take we did was perfect and we loved it so much, but you could slightly see them when we looked back on it. Even though it was a long shot and it was executed well, we didn't want that in our film at all. So we shot it again and thankfully it came out well. We had so many important props in our film.

On our filming days, we were always worrying about the outside lighting. Alexa and I would try to film after school mostly because I have work on the weekends and we were both always busy. But by the time we get home and situate ourselves the lighting outside would start to dim. We would spend our first couple of days starting our production, just going out and shopping or picking up whatever we needed. Then it would be spent trying to plan out everything we needed to film on later days. Alexa was our cinematographer and I was the main actress. We would always look back on what we filmed to make sure it was done correctly. We wouldn't move on until we loved it. No matte how many takes it took. In some scenes it was hard not to laugh. Especially since Alexa and I are such good friends. Our friends Diego and Sonali also helped us to as well as act in our film. In the scene where I have a panic attack because I couldn't find my pills and my mom runs from where she was sitting into