CCRs: Research & Script pt. 1

Hey Blog! 

The portfolio project that we have been working on for the past couple weeks is only partly comprised of the film opening I've been talking a lot about recently. The other part is the CCR's. CCR is short for Creative Critical Reflection and this is a moment where we, as the creators of our films, get the opportunity to reflect on what we have just created through four questions that have been provided to us.

- How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
- How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
- How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
- How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

On this blog post, however, I will only be concentrating on the first of these questions, and will then move onto the rest in future posts. So, "how does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?"

First, let's discuss what some conventions that are commonly used within the coming-of-age genre are. This type of story most often features teenaged characters, or characters that are on the brink of some sort of personal growth or other transitional period. They embark on a journey of self-discovery, overcome personal challenges, or confront social conflicts and uncertainty as they learn valuable life lessons that will help them to mature and grow into the person they will be in the future. Often, films will feature parent troubles, school life, first romances, and learning about our own identities and sense of self. 

Coming-of-age films often exemplify the emotional intensity of teenagers as they face the many challenges that come with growing up. This is largely done through a focus on characters and dialogue rather than dramatic actions, as many adventure movies do, but the characters' conflicts are largely dramatized so the audience can feel the importance of the situation as the characters themselves feel it. They tend to include elements such as comedy and music and will sometimes blend in other genres such as action or horror.

When creating our story's premise for our own film opening, we chose to use many of these genre conventions since we love classic coming-of-age films for their great representation of teenagers, which, as teenagers, we love to see. They are the type of movie that helps you feel seen as a person and they help you to understand the world and your place in it a little bit more than before watching it. Our story deals with the universal feeling of starting college or university and our characters are lucky enough that they, as best friends, can go onto this next chapter of their lives together. However, they soon learn that life isn't all roses and rainbows as they are hit with the harsh reality that sometimes plans don't work out as we want them to and there is nothing to do about it.

Our characters are faced with medical problems, but this can present itself in a variety of ways and everyone will experience it differently. Lily and Jackie will go from being the happy go-lucky teens that think they are ready to face the world, to people that have faced the world, and its cruelty, but come out on top regardless. Jackie will learn how to overcome Lily's death, and how to move past it to continue living her life without her best friend. Our film starts with our opening featuring both characters in their excitement of being accepted into the same college, emphasized by the bright lights and colors throughout as well as the upbeat music played in the background. However, the colors and the music fade and become more muted as there are hints to the troubles that will come from Lily's illness. Grief is one of the major themes in our opening, and it is such a universal feeling that is very on par with the coming-of-age genre as many teenagers may experience such a strong emotion so early on in their life. The pain of a loss as great as that of a best friend makes a huge impact on the development of a young adult such as Jackie in this film, which is the sort of feeling we are trying to evoke in our film so that the audience can relate to it, as they do with coming-of-age films.

SOURCES:
Gunn, N. (2025, January 10). Common Young Adult (YA) Fiction Conventions. Ooligan Press. https://www.ooliganpress.com/young-adult-conventions/

Coming-of-Age Movies: What is the Coming-of-Age Genre?. MasterClass. (2021, September 24). https://www.masterclass.com/articles/coming-of-age-movies

Quintanilla, E. (2021, March 6). What is a Coming-of-Age Movie?. Medium. https://medium.com/coming-of-age-with-film/what-is-a-coming-of-age-movie-7ebf1121ca1c

Kench, S. (2023, September 24). What is a Coming of Age Movie — Examples and Characteristics. StudioBinder. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-coming-of-age-movie-definition/