Critical Reflection

My short film Echo of the Trees is a horror film that triggers the fear of being lost. It tells a story about a boy who initially leaves his house in a forest with his elder sister who needs to take a few reference pictures for her artwork. As they traverse through the greenery, they settle down for a bit before the boy realizes his keychain has fallen off his bag at some point in time. He signals his sister before leaving to retrace his steps. He eventually finds this keychain lying on the ground before he hears something from his walkie-talkie in his pocket: it’s his sister calling him back, but before he can answer properly, the signal cuts off. He begins his journey back to where his sister is, waiting for him. After a bit of walking, something feels strange. He keeps seeing the same trees, the same big rocks, same obstacles. At first, he shrugs it off, thinking it is just what the forest is like. It’s filled with trees and rocks. The boy keeps on going, his walk turning into a sprint. The film continues on to represent this “running in a circle” feeling and it ends with the character’s desperate attempt to find a way out of him giving up and stopping.

This film is meant to represent the sense of unfamiliarity in an environment or situation. This is mostly developed to evoke this fear of being lost, but could also be interpreted as a metaphor for being unable to exactly figure out what to do in new situations without assistance– which could make it feel as if one is continuously walking in circles with no progress. At some point, the boy seemingly embodies a feeling of anxiousness, represented by the fast-paced clips near the second half of the film. The audience is meant to sympathize with the boy, sharing the same feeling of anxiety. The young appearance of the actor also extends this sympathy as he is merely a child with an extreme limitation on life experience. Children are viewed as one who needs the most guidance in comparison to many other age groups, compared to the targeted audience. I also believed that the casting of a child as the main character in the horror genre of films was not too prevalent as many of these films feature teenager or adult characters for example The Elevator, which features a woman.

Throughout producing this film, many drastic changes were made until its final product. The original plot and plans for the short film were changed the most. It started off to be a Drama and Thriller of a morally gray character’s toxic relationship with her boyfriend, but I had writer’s block trying to conjure up ideas on how I would expand on this idea. It then became the idea of a film where the main character is exploring the forest and comes across something that seems very displaced. They embark on a journey that eventually turns out to be dangerous to uncover the mysteries behind the item, but the end reveals that it was all just a scheme to kill the main character out of revenge by the close friend, finding that this is the best way to cover up the murder as it could be written off as an accident. I couldn’t come up with a good way to execute the film even though I really liked the idea, so I had to come up with something else. 

The beginning of making this specific plot of getting lost would be when I came up with the idea of a character who unintentionally strays away from his friends during a camping trip and enters some abandoned building out of curiosity, which he ends up getting lost in as all the hallways and rooms seemed to have been looping… everything looks the same. The few changes I made from this plan were the cast due to the inconvenient schedules of my planned actors as well as the setting, since abandoned buildings (urban exploration) are quite dangerous in themselves and would be quite difficult to pinpoint any that would be rid of danger, just as seen in the following storyboard:

I eventually came up with this plan of a young boy getting lost in the forest. Yes, it is much simpler than the other few ideas, and though I wanted to work with one of those other ideas, especially the second idea, I decided that I should make the rational decision of sticking with a simpler plot because though I was many weeks into starting this project, I still had not come up with a thorough plan for the revenge story. It’s not easy to sit down with these ideas and brainstorm good ideas when all my ideas really just come to me in bursts of random times.

Either way, I still liked this plot enough to be able to film it. I actually really enjoyed finding a suitable font for this film too. I think picking out elements of the film for branding really makes me feel like I am in control. Though I am actually in control of the entire project, I felt a bit lost until the branding, since by this point I had at least a reference on which to base the elements. The font I chose is called Stackz. This text is bold, slightly blurred, and distorted with parts of the letters missing. I chose a distorted font since I saw many horror films that had this feature. From what I saw, if the thumbnail does not seem creepy or eerie enough, the font will signify to the viewer its genre. Some examples I referenced:

This font as a whole subtly represents the main character’s distorted perception of the setting. It sets a very eerie tone, which the film demonstrates. I incorporated a certain palette of colors on social media too, like this post here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C5lqycHu7D1enXNsN4aeRG4co95lAYnFNCrp8U0/. It demonstrated to viewers what exactly the film would look like, with its main colors being deep greens and browns with subtle hints of blues from the sky and white from the character’s shirt. Other promotional posts like https://www.instagram.com/p/C5hsKsvtggjIyLuX9ul9-aHRRQln_KjSH881yY0/, https://www.instagram.com/p/C5ZmLPsuvfOYiiLAf3w7ps3yQXAbeSC_dPJTtU0/, https://www.instagram.com/p/C5l_JDMOH11UTtVZRTRtyNySTL92uOlKHj6jN00/ all demonstrate this color pattern (as well as the postcard). The social media engages with the audience via countdown stickers, uploads of bloopers, and behind-the-scenes posts which make the viewers feel connected to the production overall. I thought this project was quite fun and heavily challenged my creativity. I also wish to revisit my second story idea for a future project though.