Creative Critical Reflection

The Creative Critical Reflection is the final component of the AICE Media Studies portfolio, and it requires responding to four questions that cover every major dimension of the production process, from genre conventions and representation to audience engagement, skill development, and technology integration. Nicole and I both completed our own individual CCR responses, each using different creative formats to reflect on the project from our own perspectives.

Below are my four CCR responses. Each one uses a different format, and each format was chosen specifically because it matched the nature of the question it was answering.

Question 1 — How does your product use or challenge conventions, and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Format: Magazine — Reel Talk, Issue No. 01

I answered this question in the format of a magazine feature, using Ina Garten's viral Brownie Pudding recipe as a structural framework for analyzing how Competitive, Much? uses and subverts romantic comedy conventions. Each ingredient in the recipe corresponds to a different convention or representational decision in the film, from the butter as the meet-cute, to the bain-marie water bath as the central subversion of the typical rom-com female lead. I chose the magazine format because Question 1 is an analytical question, and presenting that analysis within a designed, visually engaging format allowed me to show critical thinking alongside creative presentation skills. The recipe parallel also gave me a way to address the hybrid nature of the film in how it uses familiar conventions as a container for something more unconventional inside in a way that was specific, visual, and connected to the content.

REEL TALK — CCR Issue.pdf by Zunairah

Question 2 — How does your product engage with and distribute to its audience?

Format: Career Ladder — with Nicole asking the questions

I answered this question in the format of Max Klymenko's Career Ladder, adapted so that Nicole asks a series of questions that progressively reveal the target audience profile, distribution strategy, and marketing approach for Competitive, Much? as though she is building toward a final guess. The guessing format works for this question because audience and distribution is something that can be slowly revealed each answer narrows the picture until the full profile is visible. I discussed our 18 to 25 target demographic, the streaming-first distribution model, the social media marketing strategy centered on short-form video content on TikTok and Instagram, and the specific underrepresented audience, Latino teenagers, that Competitive, Much? speaks to directly.

Question 3 — How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

Format: Pop the Balloon

I answered this question using the Pop the Balloon format, where each balloon represents a skill I didn't have at the start of the project. I popped each one and discussed where I started and where I ended up camera settings on the Canon T7i, blocking and directing actors, scriptwriting and dialogue, colour grading in Lumetri Color, sound design and music, and production planning. The balloon format works for this question because skill development is naturally list-based and progressive, and physically popping each balloon gives the video a clear visual rhythm and forward momentum that keeps it engaging throughout.

Question 4 — How did you integrate technologies in this project?

Format: The Report Card

I answered this question as a report card, sitting at a desk and going through each technology I used, the Canon EOS Rebel T7i, Adobe Premiere Pro, and my research and pre-production planning tools, giving each one a grade and explaining the reasoning using proper media studies terminology. The report card format works for this question because technology integration is something that can be honestly assessed and evaluated, and the grading structure naturally invites the kind of critical self-reflection the question requires. Rather than just listing what I used, I was able to discuss what each technology could and couldn't do, how it shaped my creative decisions, and what I would approach differently with more experience.

My report card:

Final Brief

"Competitive, Much?" — The Finished Opening

When Nicole and I started this project back at the beginning of the year, the version of Competitive, Much? that existed was a two sentence idea about two Hispanic teenagers competing for an achievement award who bumped into each other at a park. What exists now is a two minute film opening with a complete narrative arc, professional color grading, a voiceover, physical comedy, and a title card. I genuinely did not fully believe it would look the way it does until I watched the finished edit back.

I want to be honest because I think it's important. The production process was messy because we lost filming days to weather, we lost a week when three of our four cast and crew members were at a competition in Tampa. Eid meant I had almost no time to edit when we finally had all the footage and Nicole couldn't access Premiere Pro a long while. We never managed to get Evan a proper hockey stick prop because by the time it became urgent, sourcing one quickly at a reasonable price wasn't possible. There were setbacks at almost every stage of this project, and there were moments where I genuinely wasn't sure we were going to finish in a way I was proud of.

Then I watched the finished cut and I was in awe. The golden hues of the late afternoon park footage look exactly like the warm, soft cinematography I spent weeks researching in rom-com openings. The banter between Nadia and Evan in the argument scene has a rhythm and energy that feels cinematic, and to me, it doesn't read as a student film, it reads as two actors who understand their characters and are having a real conversation. The voiceover Nadia recorded sits perfectly in the mix, drawing you into Audrey's perspective before you've even seen her face properly and physical comedy of the ball scramble is funny. The falling moment is quiet and affecting in exactly the way we planned it during those early storyboarding sessions.

I am proud of this film and I'm proud of what Nicole and I built together, and I'm proud of what Nadia and Evan gave to it. Competitive, Much? is not perfect, no student production is,  but it is something I can look at and recognize the craft in, and that's something I didn't know I was capable of at the start of this year.

Below is the finished two minute opening sequence of Competitive, Much? by NZ Studios. We hope you enjoy just as much as we did making it. 

Credits:
Directed by — Zunairah & Nicole
Produced by — Zunairah & Nicole
Written by — Zunairah & Nicole
Director of Photography — Zunairah & Nicole
Edited by — Zunairah & Nicole
Title Card Design — Zunairah & Nicole

Starring: Nadia Nicolas as Audrey Daniels Evan Ventura as Mattias Salomon

A NZ Studios Production

Production - Editing Part 4: Finalizing the Title Card

There is something almost funny about the fact that the title card which is maybe three seconds of the finished film ended up being one of the most complicated things to actually get working. After everything that had already gone sideways during this project, from the weather delays to the wind noise to Eid landing right in the middle of our editing window, I had, of course, thought that importing a PNG into Premiere Pro was going to be the easy part.

The Export Problem

When Nicole finished the title card design in Canva, we hit a wall almost immediately. The version with the modified question mark and incorporated the books and the hockey stick to represent Audrey and Mattias was the design we were both most excited about. It felt specific to the story in a way that the earlier, simpler drafts didn't. But when we went to export it, Canva was only giving us a PDF output for that version of the file.

PDFs do not behave the way image files do inside Premiere Pro. You cannot resize them cleanly, you cannot adjust individual elements, and layering them over footage the way we needed to was not working the way we had planned. I spent longer than I want to admit trying to figure out whether there was a workaround, and Nicole did too. There wasn't one that was going to give us a clean result in the time we had left.

What it looked like exported and cropped

This was very frustrating because the question mark design had been the solution to a whole other problem as the soccer ball O idea that hadn't worked out  and now this version wasn't cooperating either. At some point you have to recognize when a creative direction has hit a practical limit and make a decision.

Building the Title Card in Premiere Pro

Because importing a clean version of the Canva design was not going to work, I ended up rebuilding the title card from scratch directly inside Premiere Pro using the Essential Graphics panel. This meant finding a font that matched what we had been going for with Norwester as closely as possible, which turned out to be its own challenge.

Premiere Pro has a lot of fonts available and most of them are not what you are looking for when you need something specific. I went through quite a few options trying to find something that had the same bold, clean, slightly geometric quality that Norwester had in the Canva version. Some were too rounded, some were too condensed, some had stylistic details that made them feel wrong for a rom-com title even if they looked strong on their own. It took longer than it should have, and there were a few moments where I had to stop myself from just picking something and moving on before I had actually found the right one.

Eventually I landed on a font that I felt captured the same spirit and was bold enough to read instantly, clean enough not to distract from what was happening in the shot underneath it. It was not a perfect match for Norwester, but in context, against the footage and with the hot pink color applied, it held up.

What the Title Card Does in Context

Something I kept coming back to while we were finalizing this is that the title card does not exist in isolation. It is the last thing the audience sees before the film ends, and everything leading up to it, like  the warm color grade shifting in when Audrey and Mattias collide, the non-diegetic record scratch cutting through the scene, the camera racking focus from the characters to the ball,  has already done the work of establishing tone. The title card just has to land cleanly on top of all of that.

I went back and looked at some of the title cards from the films I researched earlier in the process. Anyone But You uses clean, unfussy lettering which was confident typography that tells you immediately what kind of film you are watching. Our simplified version actually sits closer to that reference than the embellished question mark version would have. The directness is part of what makes it feel like a rom-com title. Bright color, bold font, the title lands and fades to black. Genre conventions exist because they work, and this was a case where simplifying brought us closer to what those conventions actually look like in practice.

vs.

vs. 

In context it reads exactly the way we wanted it to. Competitive, Much? as a title has always had a built-in playfulness to it, and the typography honors that.

Reflection

The honest version of this is that the final title card is not exactly what Nicole and I set out to make, but it is good, and I have stopped being bothered by the difference. The question mark embellishment was a smart idea that ran into a technical reality, rebuilding in Premiere Pro meant navigating a font library that made a simple decision feel more complicated than it needed to be, and at every stage the right call was to keep moving rather than keep chasing the original vision.

What we ended up with is clean, it is genre-appropriate, it works inside the edit, and it looks like it belongs in the film we actually made. After months of scheduling around drama rehearsals and Ramadan and Nicole not having Premiere Pro access and weather that would not cooperate, watching the full sequence play through with the title card sitting where it was supposed to sit felt like enough. Everything accumulated into that moment, and it looked like a film opening.

Production - Editing Part 3: Designing the Title Card

Getting to the title card stage felt like we were finally close to the finish line. After everything, having something as concrete as a title card to work on was almost a relief. But I also knew going in that it wasn't going to be as straightforward as it sounded. The title card is one of the most important frames in the whole film and it's the moment the audience gets confirmation of what they're watching, and in a rom-com especially, it has to do a lot of tonal work in a very short amount of time.

Nicole took the lead on the actual design in Canva but I was involved in the decision-making the whole way through, and a lot of the back-and-forth over what was and wasn't working happened between the two of us.

Why Canva Instead of Premiere Pro

When I was doing my earlier research into rom-com title sequences, one thing that stood out to me was how much the typography in these films communicates genre before anything else. Anyone But You uses clean, confident lettering that immediately signals something light and fun is coming. That kind of intentionality is hard to achieve when you're working inside an editing timeline; you end up making compromises based on what's technically easy rather than what looks right.

Inspired by Anyone But You

Using Canva gave us the freedom to actually experiment. We could test fonts side by side, adjust sizing, play with color combinations, and figure out what read clearly against different backgrounds before we committed to anything. Once the design was finalized, Nicole would export it as a PNG and we would import it directly into Premiere Pro as an overlay. It would keep the workflow clean and would mean we weren't fighting with the editing timeline to get the typography right.

The Font Decision

From the beginning, Nicole and I both agreed the title had to be hot pink and bold. That wasn't even really a discussion, it came directly out of our genre research. Romantic comedies use color as a signaling system. The brightness, the warmth, the slight over-saturation, all of it tells the audience this is going to be fun and light before a single line of dialogue plays. I wrote about this in my earlier post on genre conventions, and it was one of those cases where the research made a decision feel obvious.

The harder part was finding the right font. The ones Nicole and I had both been drawn to during research weren't available on Canva, which was frustrating because we'd been picturing something very specific. We ended up testing a lot of options that were either too decorative, too generic, or too difficult to read at the size we needed.

Eventually we landed on Norwester, and I think it was the right call. It's bold without being aggressive, clean without being boring. There's a sharpness to the letterforms that gives the title some energy, which matched the tone of the film; Audrey is precise and competitive, and something about Norwester felt like it had that same quality. It also held up clearly against the background without needing any additional styling to make it readable, which mattered because we were layering it onto footage rather than a flat graphic.

The Question Mark and Character Representation

This is the part of the process I found most interesting to think through, even if it was also the most time-consuming. Once the font was decided, Nicole started experimenting with ways to make the title more visually specific to the story. One early idea was replacing or modifying the "O" in "Competitive" with a soccer ball, since the ball is literally the inciting incident of the film since it's what rolls between Audrey and Mattias, what they both scramble for, what sets the whole collision in motion.

However, he Norwester O is slim and narrow, and no matter what we tried, fitting a soccer ball shape into it without it looking messy just wasn't working. Nicole even tried drawing the black pattern marks onto the O manually, but it came out looking rough. It was one of those ideas that made complete sense conceptually and just didn't survive with reality.

What did work was the question mark. The title is "Competitive, Much?" and that question mark is already doing something because it's playful, it's rhetorical and it has a tone to it. Nicole had the idea of transforming it to represent both characters, using objects that connect to who they are: books for Audrey, a hockey stick for Mattias. When I saw the direction she was heading I thought it was clever, because it takes something decorative and makes it meaningful. Instead of just a stylized punctuation mark, it becomes a tiny piece of visual storytelling. The audience might not consciously register it, but it's there.

This was the kind of thinking I'd been reading about during my research into title sequences. The best ones don't just announce the film, they do something. They set up a visual language, introduce a theme, or hint at character relationships. Getting our title card to do even a small version of that felt like a real success

Production - Editing Part 2: Sound Design and Music

 Sound was the last major element to come together, and it was also the thing that made the single biggest difference to how the film felt when everything was assembled. Going from a rough cut with no music to the same cut with the score underneath it was striking because the genre became readable in a way it hadn't been from visuals alone, and the emotional weight of every scene increased significantly. Sound is not decoration in film, it is structure.

Finding the Music

From the very early stages of planning, Nicole and I knew we wanted a soft indie instrumental for the opening sequence. The tone we were going for was warm, light, and slightly romantic without being heavy-handed and established the rom-com register without announcing it too loudly. We had a specific reference in mind: Slow Dance by Clairo, whose sound is exactly the blend of upbeat and relaxed that we felt matched Audrey's character and the energy of the opening sequence.

The problem was copyright and Clairo's music could not be used in Premiere Pro without significant restrictions, and the legal and technical complications of using commercially licensed music in a student production made it an unrealistic option. We needed royalty-free music that captured a similar quality.

We found what we were looking for on Pixabay, which has a strong library of free indie instrumental tracks. The track we settled on has the light, contemporary feel we were looking for as it builds naturally toward the title card moment. It is not Clairo, but it serves the same narrative function, and sourcing it from Pixabay meant we could use it without any copyright concerns.

How the Music Enters

One of the more considered sound design decisions was when and how to introduce the music. Our initial instinct was to bring it in while Audrey is still in voiceover, but when we tested that it undermined the intimacy of her narration. The voiceover is the audience's first real contact with Audrey as a character, it's where she establishes her voice, her personality, her interiority, and laying music underneath it too early pulled the focus away from that.

Adjusting voiceover on montage

The solution was a fade structure. Audrey's voiceover fades out as she finishes speaking, and the music fades in as that fade completes. The transition happens at the moment she leaves the house and the film moves into the park running sequence. This creates a sense of crossing a threshold from her internal world into the external world of the story and the music entering at that exact point reinforces that shift. The music then comes back in more fully and warmly during the falling scene, where the emotional register of the film reaches its highest point.

The Record Scratch

The record scratch was my idea, and I felt strongly about including it. In the crash scene, during the moment where both Audrey and Mattias suddenly crash into each other and then realize who it is they crashed into, I inserted a record scratch sound effect, a classic comedic device borrowed from the language of comedy editing, which signals the sudden tonal shift from aloof to surprise in a way that is both funny and visually clean. It tells the audience that what was happening has paused, and something new is about to begin.

I found the record scratch sound effect on Pixabay for free, the same source as the music. It sits at exactly the right moment in the cut and lands with the comedic impact I wanted. Small sound design choices like this one are what distinguish a film that feels considered from one that feels assembled, and this particular choice is one of the ones I'm most happy with in the finished product.

https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/sudden-stop/

The Audio Cleanup

The wind noise from the park filming day was one of the most time-consuming problems in post-production. Outdoor dialogue scenes are always vulnerable to wind noise because wind sits in the same frequency range as speech, which makes it difficult to remove without also affecting the dialogue. I used the Enhanced Speech tool in Premiere Pro to clean up the worst of it, which significantly improved the clarity of the argument scene. I also made manual frequency adjustments to reduce the harshness of the wind in sections where Enhanced Speech alone wasn't enough. The goal throughout was to make the dialogue sound as though it had been recorded cleanly while not making it sound processed.
 

Struggling to clean up audio

The Small Details

Beyond the music and the record scratch, I layered in ambient sound throughout the park sequences  background park noise, distant sounds, the texture of an outdoor environment. These details are invisible when they work. Without them the park scenes would feel like they were filmed in a vacuum, which would undercut the realism we built through location scouting and careful framing. The sound of Nadia's string headphones being knocked out during the collision, the ball on concrete during the scramble sequence, these are small additions that ground each moment in physical reality. Sound design is largely the art of adding things the audience doesn't consciously notice but would immediately miss.

Links Used: https://pixabay.com/music/search/indie/ https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/sudden-stop/ https://nofilmschool.com/how-to-reduce-wind-noise-in-premiere-pro https://www.masterclass.com/articles/sound-design-guide

Production - Editing Part 1: Importing, Organizing, and the Rough Cut

After everything Nicole and I had put into filming, the weather delays, scheduling around Tampa, the reshoot days, all of it, actually sitting down to edit felt like a completely different kind of challenge. I went into post-production thinking the hard part was done and I was dead wrong. Having footage is not the same as having a film, and the distance between those two things is where every real creative decision gets made.

Importing and Organising

The first thing I did before touching a single clip was set up the project structure in Premiere Pro. We had footage from two locations, Nadia's house for the intro sequence and William B. Armstrong Dream Park for everything else, across multiple filming days, with multiple takes and angle variations for each scene. Going into that without a clear folder system would have made finding anything a nightmare.

I created separate bins for each scene called alarm, clothes, salad and shoes, running, crash, argument, ball scramble, falling moment and labeled every clip before I started cutting. It added time at the beginning but saved significantly more time throughout the whole editing process. I didn't understand why organization mattered this much until I was the one trying to find a specific take of a specific angle at 11pm with a deadline approaching. However, I did not remember to save my workspace and one day I had clicked something and lost all of my bins. I did not lose any of the footage, and was able to find them and drag to the timeline same as always, but it just wasn't labelled, so it was a very confusing setback. 

Building the Rough Cut

The rough cut is where you find out what you actually have. Some shots that I remembered as looking great on the day didn't work in context due to reasons like the pacing feeling wrong, or a cut between angles was jarring in a way that wasn't obvious until we saw it in sequence. Other shots that I wasn't sure about during filming turned out to be exactly what the edit needed.

The argument scene required the most work. Editing dialogue is fundamentally different from editing action because the timing is tied to performance and to the specific rhythm of how Nadia and Evan delivered those lines on the day, rather than to movement or visual action. I went through multiple versions of that scene before the cuts felt natural rather than mechanical. The rule I kept coming back to was that the cut should happen where the audience's eye is already moving, not where it's convenient structurally.

Opening montage

The opening montage was the section I found most interesting to edit because it's entirely visual, with no dialogue at all, just images and music. That meant the decisions were purely about pace and rhythm, about how long each shot needed to breathe before the next one. Too fast and the audience doesn't register what they're seeing. Too slow and the energy dies before the film has even started. Finding that balance took more passes than I expected.

The Grey-to-Color Decision

Color-graded grey running scenes

                                                              Golden hues to show contrast

Side by side comparison of research on color grading and how I used it in my film.

One of the most deliberate visual choices I made during the editing process was keeping the running sequence before the collision in muted, slightly grey tones. This was intentional from the beginning of my post-production planning. Audrey's running environment before she bumps into Mattias is controlled, routine, and neutral, showing that she is running her usual route, she is in her own head, everything is exactly as she expects it to be. The desaturated tones reflect that and they communicate stability, containment, normality.

When they crash into each other, the color shifts. The warmer tones I built throughout the rest of the film's color grade come in, and the image feels more alive, more present, more charged. That shift is not something the audience needs to consciously notice, especially because it works below the level of explicit awareness, but it reinforces the emotional meaning of the collision without any dialogue or exposition having to do that work. The moment they meet, her world changes. The color grade reflects that.

This kind of purposeful use of color as a narrative device is something I researched during the planning phase. In my analysis of rom-com cinematography conventions, warm color palettes are consistently used to signal romantic possibility, and cooler or more neutral tones are used to establish the character's emotional state before that possibility arrives and I applied that research directly to this editing decision.

Production - Argument & Falling Scene

After the ball rolls into frame and stops between them, the scene shifts into the most physically demanding sequence in the opening. Nicole and I had choreographed and rehearsed this during our park sessions, but filming it for real with the camera rolling was a different experience, and there were adjustments we had to make on the day that we hadn't fully anticipated.

How the Argument Builds

What I find most interesting about this scene structurally is that it starts with a moment of almost accidental cooperation. Both Audrey and Mattias see the ball at the same time, there's a brief pause, and for one second it looks like they might just handle it normally. Then they both say "I got it" simultaneously and the whole thing unravels. That beat was important to us because it shows the conflict isn't inevitable, they choose it even when they don't have to. That says more about their dynamic than any line of dialogue could.

The argument builds in two stages of verbal first, then physical. The verbal stage is quick because neither of them is going to out-talk the other and they both know it. The physical stage is where the scene gets its energy, and it required the most direction during filming. We needed it to look genuinely chaotic and competitive without looking dangerous or choreographed, which is a harder balance to strike than it sounds.

Two Shots Throughout

For most of the argument we kept both characters in the same frame rather than cutting between them. This was deliberate because the whole point of the scene is that neither of them can get away from the other, and cutting to them separately would have broken that feeling. When they're both in frame simultaneously the audience can see how close they are and how neither of them is backing down, and that proximity does storytelling work without us having to underline it.

The Physical Contact Moment

One specific moment that came together really well on the day was when Mattias grabs Audrey's arms during the scuffle. It was in the script but the physical choice of him actually taking her hand while delivering the line developed during filming rather than being planned in advance. It changes the energy of the scene completely because the argument stops being about the ball and becomes about them, and the shift is visible on both their faces. Audrey pushing him off after that and falling into his chest is what leads directly into the falling scene, and having that arm moment right before it means the transition feels perfect. 

What the Ball Represents

Looking back at this scene, the ball is doing more narrative work than just being a prop. It's the thing they're both refusing to give up, but neither of them actually cares about returning its owner, they care about not letting the other one win. It's a small, slightly ridiculous object that becomes a symbol of everything they've been competing over since ninth grade. The comedy comes from how seriously they're taking something so petty, and the romance comes from the fact that they're both so invested in each other that even this matters.

The Falling Scene

This was the last scene we filmed, which felt appropriate because it's the last moment in the opening and in a lot of ways the entire two minutes builds toward it. Everything before, from the intro, the run, the argument, to the ball, exists to make this moment land. That made filming it feel like it carried weight, and Nicole and I were both very conscious of needing to get it right.

How We Wanted It to Feel

The conversation Nicole and I kept coming back to during planning was that this fall shouldn't look romantic in the traditional sense. Audrey is not a graceful, soft character and we established that in the first seconds of the argument. If she fell onto Mattias in some perfectly composed, cinematic way it would contradict everything we'd already shown about her. The fall needed to feel like her; slightly abrupt, a little chaotic, and not at all what she planned.

So the physical action itself is deliberately unpolished. She steps on his foot, loses her balance, and the momentum takes them both into each other. It's not elegant. But the moment that follows it is, and that contrast is what makes the scene work. The fall is funny because it's messy. The pause after it is something else entirely.

The Pause

After the fall both of them freeze. Audrey looks up at Mattias and there's a beat where nothing happens, with no dialogue, no movement, just two people who were arguing thirty seconds ago suddenly very close together and not entirely sure what to do about it. That moment was the most important thing to get right during filming because it's the emotional center of the entire opening.

What Nadia brought to that beat was really specific. The confusion in her expression, not quite embarrassment, not quite awareness, somewhere between the two, is exactly what the scene needed, and she looked very endearing to the audience.  Instead of it being a moment where Audrey realizes she has feelings for Mattias, it's a moment where she doesn't know what she's feeling, which is much more honest and much more interesting. Evan stayed completely still, which was the right instinct as any movement from him in that beat would have broken it.

The Focus Shift

Once we had the fall and the pause filmed, the final element was the focus shift, the camera racking from them in the background to the ball sharp in the foreground. Getting it to look intentional rather than accidental required patience. We tested the distance between the ball and the actors several times to find the right depth of field separation. When it works, the ball coming into sharp focus while they stay soft in the background feels like the camera makes the joke land about the whole situation because it's drawing attention to the ridiculous object that caused all of this while the two of them are still standing there not moving apart.

Why Filming This Last Was Right

By the time we got to this shot, Nadia and Evan had already filmed all of their more active dialogue-heavy scenes together, which meant they were fully comfortable with each other and with the physical proximity this scene required. The comfort level in this scene compared to early rehearsals was noticeably different and I think it shows in the footage. You can't manufacture that ease because it comes from time spent working together, and by this point in production we had done exactly that.