AICE Media Studies

    Critical Reflection on your portfolio   • 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 as 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 her mother's reaction and her obvious mental health issues, you  know that she is not truly the person on the screen. She's a person consumed by addiction and isn't  comfortable with herself fully. She was an innocent child who went through a trag

 Ambulance   Today we filmed our ambulance scene. During our 5th period, we are lucky enough to have a practice ambulance in our EMS room. Paola is also a student in the class so the teacher volunteered to help us and another student. I first started helping to gather all of our props and pre ambulance. There were a lot of medical bags on the stretcher we were going to film on. SO I had to take that off. Then there was a dummy and I also had to move that. Which was super heavy. Then as Paola was starting to put on her makeup, I turned on the ambulance and started setting up the lights I also wanted to make sure there was nothing Fort Lauderdale related in the shots. I started looking around in one of his closets for more props. Then I found spirit wax. Which is for cosmetics and I asked and he said it was a fake gore kit. So we started putting makeup on Paola which started looking very realistic. I started looking over our scripts and storyboards making sure we weren't, is anything

 Final Scene This scene was a lot. Not only was there pressure because of the strength of the scene and its overall ideals. Yet it was a one-take scene. Meaning we could only do it once. I had to make the throwup which smelled good but looked HORRIFIC. We originally researched what fake throwup consists of. I watched various youtube videos on how to make it. Lots of them consisted of oats, applesauce, and corn or some time of vegetable. Which gave it a look of realness. Then I sadly had to watch multiple of Hollywood's best or most known throw scenes. I didn't want a projectile fake-looking throw-up. When I say this I mean like in the exrosise. We used lentils Pao's mom made two nights before. They were brown and they had red pieces due to tomatoes I assume. She also was making pumpkin soup for the next day. She already had a somewhat of a big pan of the thick substance. I started mushing and mixing the substance. It looked absolutely disgusting and made me gag. I tried it

 Holy Cross We needed to film Paola leaving the hospital. Yet we don't own a hospital and this was risky due to covid and such. So we got out friend Sonali to help us. We thifted her a scrubs as previously talked about in my other blog. So borrowed a wheelchair from my grandma's house. She sadly passed but like she's not using it so we took her old wheelchair.  Then we drove to our nearest hospital aka Holy Cross. We originally were going to take the scene at the emergency room entrance. Of course not blocking any personal or sick people. Yet as we were looking we saw a lot of people waiting outside... We weren't going to put ourselves or others in danger so we just ended up driving around. I knew the hospital pretty well so I took them to another part of the hospital outside. Yet as we were driving we saw an almost empty parking lot and door in one of the wings of the hospital. We kept that in mind while still driving to our second spot. Yet there were a few cars right

Prep for Ambulance Scene   The day before our ambulance scene. During my study hall, I went to Mr. Evans's classroom and verified that we were able to film. We also wanted to make sure he was still comfortable doing our film. Pao continued to talk. While I started counting out angles. I went from all four corners of the ambulance. I also messed around with the lighting to see which mood I wanted. I wanted to start off with an attention-grabbing sense. I wanted bright lighting to give the realistic feel of an ambulance rather than darkening somber lighting. I needed to figure out how I was going to position myself to get the perfect shot. I can only shoot this scene once.  So I  know how important this is. I wanted to make sure we are precise. I didn't want to just walk into a new environment and film even though I know I could. Paola and I started looking for prescription bottles. I wanted to find one and make a label for it.  For our future sense for when the medication gets p

 Drug Deal  Now to jump into our drug deal scene. We had to do this science at night in the dark. Not only is that hard in itself. YEt we also had to shoot this in a car. Not only was the lighting literally HORRIBLE... we also had to deal with it on and off raining. I used my mom's car to film and my actors were Paola and our bestie Diego. We had just picked him up from a soccer game but we still had to film. We drove him to a park by my house and shot the sense. This was very improvised overall, I gave a lot of control to Paola with the filming aspects. We agreed on a POV angle. Meaning the perspective would be at almost eye level. We did this to make our audience feel as if they are there. We had to take a lot of takes with this scene. I was tried from a day of school and volunteering. I started to honestly get very agitated with this experience. I was tired, stressed out, and overworked. I honestly didn't really enjoy this experience but we still finished it. I filmed and th