Critical Reflection #31

  Originally, Fight Simulator VR was just going to be parallel to most of my other films; an excellent way for my friends to get together and create something new.  A lot of my past projects were seen like this, especially the film introduction during AS Level.  I’m always super excited when receiving these types of projects where I have free reign to essentially create whatever I want, hence my excitement when I reach out to my friends, David and Saloman, and told them about the idea of a fight-oriented, sci-fi/action short film that I was cooking up in my brain the instance my teacher talked about the possibility of a short film.  Fast forward to the end of the year, and my short film is steadily coming together, but I needed to ensure the proper amount of depth to go into the project, as opposed to creating a hollow film with no structure.  

Regarding that depth, it was tricky coming up with the message or the bigger picture with my film.  As I said, I was originally making this short film as a nice little amusing project, not really focusing much on the ulterior messages that could lie within.  But over the course of not only writing, planning, filming, and editing the project, I also managed to find inspiration from other classes, mainly as a means to find the issue and message that my film tries to uncover.  For instance, my film, Fight Simulator VR is about a near future, in which the main character, David, straps into an extremely sophisticated VR headset, entrapping himself into a VR video game tutorial that he can’t escape from, ultimately dying in the process!  This technological concept may sound familiar, as a lot of my inspiration came from Ready Player One, along with the dystopic technology feeling of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, both of which I read during my English class a couple of months ago.  I used both these books as such heavy inspiration, yet neglected to apply the fundamental values that they speak towards, instead opting for the more fantastical aspects that these stories offer.  And that’s where I went wrong during the planning process of my film, and I only realized and managed to apply it during the rest of the production.  And I believe that’s what my film is truly striving to represent.  While appearing like a fantastic idea of a future regarding technology, it also speaks towards the potential dangers that come with it.  Obviously people aren’t literally going to physically die while bearing a headset, however, I think in terms of the dangers that technology could inherit later in our future is an underlying message, a warning towards a future that virtual reality that could completely swap our very way of life, consuming us humans into a digital universe that we may not be able to recover from.  Hence why David’s experience is so surreal and immersive, symbolizing the possible immersion humankind could potentially fall into.  It’s seen a lot within technology-related dystopias, in which the main characters find themselves engrossed within the technology, only to break out and figure out what’s wrong, which is correlated and seen within my film as David dives into the headset, only to figure out it’s not what it seems, following similar genre conventions.

After all that philosophical verbiage, now it’s time to talk about one of my favorite parts of this film: research!  Research, and especially the planning phase for this project was extremely unorthodox.  Usually, when I sit down to create something, I’ll plan, write, and eventually storyboard the whole thing before hopping toward the next step.  But remember when I emphasized that my film was fight-oriented?  That’s where I ran into some issues.  Creating a fight scene on paper is extremely tough, which not only led me to the internet but the outside world.  Regarding the Internet, I managed to find a YouTuber named Rustic, who is a professional stuntman and has a nice in-depth series about filming fight scenes and making sure they look nice and fluid.  After taking some notes, I would take my friends, go outside, and practice some fight maneuvers along with teaching my friends the fundamentals of pretending to hit each other.  The video above really emphasizes the idea of planning, not only to ensure safety but also to secure fluidity in the fight scene and make it look natural as opposed to simply looking loosely put together.  We would practice for about 2 hours every Saturday for two weeks, improving moves and recording them in order to be sure that they could be replicated during the final shoot, and you can check out the progress here!  Other than that, more of the research took place indoors, in which I would study a lot of my favorite action movies, like The Matrix and John Wick, and study not only some of the awesome moves they perform but also some other elements of those films like branding and engagement with the audience.  These films tend to cater towards a not necessarily niche audience, but a specifically large one; male, 13-28 range, middle-class status.  So when viewing these films I would follow the movement speed of the punches, editing tactics regarding camera movement, and even dove into the social media.  

Speaking of social media, I centered my branding on films that fit into my genre, like the movie Ready Player One, and would garner insight into their social media, which I would then employ. For example, the Instagram page for Ready Player One has some color branding in which the futuristic colors of retro blue and glaring purple would be used in order to give the title a color to correlate to, along with an easily recognizable, futuristic font to go alongside it.  Additionally, you can even see the posts they create and put out some of the vibes and color coordination with the many overall colors, giving a sense of consistency. I would match this style on my page, in which my color palette of red, white, and black would be applied to other content that I put out, along with a glitchy-looking sort of font.  As you can see, the font and color scheme is consistent when it comes to the postcard advertisement, along with the post regarding the release of my short film on YouTube.  The Instagram page would also include behind-the-scenes material and extra insight into the creation of the short film.  I would then take this consistency and directly apply it to the final short film, which can be seen in the props, fake flood, and title card toward the beginning