Creative Critical Reflection

Tru 2 U targets teen girls that are going into high school or are already there as it is about a teen girl going through the struggles of finding love and herself in high school. 

Our film is about a nerdy, teenage girl, Lara, who gets bullied at her school. She starts to develop a crush on the popular boy but gets upset as she knows he will never notice her. Her best friend decides to give her a big makeover from head to toe. She starts to get seen by the popular jock but now needs to be able to stay true to herself. 

The song we used in the trailer is girly and we used a lot of pink colouring with our logo and text. We tried to use these colours to represent a girly girl going to high school falling in love with a boy. In the trailer it shows social groups and issues that go on in typical high schools. Studies have shown that people make a judgement about someone or something in a tenth of a second which means our audience will know if this is the right film for them. At the start of the film trailer, Lara is represented as a socially awkward girl who doesn’t have many friends. She is a star student due to her academic intelligence but this is her social downfall. Lara is treated very poorly by her peers. She saw how the pretty “dumb” girls were popular and got the popular jocks she decided she wanted to have a complete makeover and dress and look like them to fit in. This outlook on the expectations of women is almost comedic of Lara desperately trying to get fit and wear more revealing clothing and heavy makeup.  However, Lara realises that that is not the person she is and the best way to be with the person she loves, is to just remain true to herself.

The title of our film is ‘Tru 2 U’. We chose this way of spelling it to already show that our film is a teen movie as it is abbreviated as if it was sent as a text message. As it is short it would be more catchy and easily remembered. In order to successfully create a sense of branding it is important for our film to be different and stand out against the other films that are in the same genre. Therefore, we explored the idea of introducing merchandise which includes an inclusive small fashion line to promote confidence and individuality in teenage girls. All the merchandise includes the ‘Tru 2 U’ brand name including the stationary. As a production team we did additional research to see how other productions advertise their film. We learnt that focusing on a particular genre makes finding our target audience a lot easier. Therefore, across our promo pack, we clearly presented that it is a high school, teen drama genre. We aimed our promo pack towards a young audience (12-25) through the colours, language and fonts. 

It is important to engage the audience and be interactive as this helps create better and more relevant content for the ‘Tru 2 U’ brand. We have done this by posting clips, stills, bloopers and BTS stories on our social media accounts. By learning what our audience wants, we can communicate with them online which gives us a better understanding on what we can add and improve on. For example, I created a  Twitter account to engage my audience where I posted behind the scene pictures and videos and the work that goes on in the making of the film. Twitter has allowed me to stay connected with other similar production companies and movies which helps me see how they promote new products. We have used high-quality videos and photographs to give our promo pack a professional aspect. So we can constantly engage audiences, we create many different social media platforms and post different things on each. As we want our audience to know we are taking in what they say, we like and reply to their comments on our posts across our social media. This will make the audience keep checking in our posts. We try to post comedic videos to get them trending which benefits the film as it will get recognition through our posts.