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.

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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.