As I take a moment to reflect upon my portfolio project, I realize that what truly drove my work was the search in finding my own story. Likewise, my short film Cutting Room Floor is exactly about that journey.
The beginning of this creative endeavor started with an observation I had about how teenagers today tend to obsess with romanticizing their lives. This trend can especially be found on social media, where users describe themselves waiting for their “coming-of-age” movie moment to come to fruition. What made this interesting to me was my perspective as a content creator, and how common filmmaking techniques such as writing, acting, cinematography, and sound had become part of a collective aspiration of how to live one’s life. After having this realization, I knew that I wanted to develop a piece that would serve as a commentary on how people try to find themselves through fiction and other media. The best way to represent this was through making the concept literal, and making my short film about how an actual movie character discovers who they are through several film genres and stories.
The concept rapidly progressed past my original focus of the relationship between self-discovery and media, and had evolved into a piece that uses media to tell an atypical narrative of self-discovery. While expanding upon this idea, my group and I took major inspiration from the 2006 film Stranger than Fiction. The movie is about how an IRS agent faces a life-threatening crisis after a mysterious narrator begins describing and plotting his impending death, which corners him into having to figure out how to stop his fate. The film’s narrative, technique, and creativity served as the foundation for our own production. We took the bashful dynamic between the protagonist and the god-like narrator and rewrote it to fit the framework of the rejection of societal standards and exploration of the self. In our film, these two are simply named the Protagonist and the Narrator. Like in Stranger than Fiction, the Narrator is also the author behind the events that happen to the protagonist, which in this case meant the writer of the different screenplays covered during the short film. Our Protagonist is rebellious towards the Narrator’s scripts due to not being able to personally connect with the generic lines written on the pages. This results in the recurring gag of the Protagonist interrupting these scenes to argue how they are basic and do not fit their character, which leads to the underlying argument of how they should have authority in picking a role that is representative of who they truly are.
The fictional screenplays in Cutting Room Floor cover a variety of genres, including action, comedy, horror, romance, and even different formats, such as a silent film and storyboard section to further embrace the meta we play with in terms of filmmaking. Due to the previous inspiration from social media, we thought it made perfect sense for the piece to begin with a coming-of age-scene. This also tied into how the short film was a coming-of-age tale in itself, as the Protagonist goes through their personal self-discovery while acting in the different scripts and eventually writing their own story instead of the one being fed to them by the Narrator. With the wide array of genres, nailing their conventions down was crucial. We mostly did this through incorporating clichés in our writing, cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and even music selection that reflected the genre of the scene. A perfect example of these elements can be found in the action segment of Cutting Room Floor. Between the intense music, gritty lighting, cowboy shots, heroic but cheesy lines, and the Protagonist’s costume paired with aviator sunglasses, it is clearly illustrated that this part of the production is a parody of blockbuster hits. On a separate note, since at the end of these scenes the Protagonist refuses to act and instead argues with the Narrator, it can be said that we both celebrate yet reject genre conventions within the short film.
The absurd concept combined with the cleverness and intelligence of the piece makes it a true burst of creative expression. For this reason, I would describe our target audience to be a relatively younger and imaginative crowd interested in avant-garde productions and highbrow comedy. The short film will also heavily appeal to film buffs and other filmmakers due to many jokes and situations being developed through filmmaking techniques such as screenplay formatting and storyboarding. This also applies to the title, as Cutting Room Floor is a reference to when editors in the film industry decades ago would cut out pieces of film that would then be scrapped or unused. Altogether, we want the film to make viewers laugh, think, and be surprised at each turn it takes, as it progresses across different genres and ends with the emotional finale of the Protagonist taking full control of their narrative.
Furthermore, the sentiment of being in charge of one’s personal narrative is what we based our brand on. Not only can this be identified at the ending of our short film, but also on our social media page where this exact point of view is embodied subtly across most posts as a hint towards the plot. The page is self-aware and comedic when we share stills from the piece, but on the other hand for behind the scenes exclusives, it takes a community-based approach of talking directly to our followers about how we made this independent student production.
The brand proves itself strong through the uniform creative design across all of the products we developed. This is most notably accomplished through the implementation of the Cutting Room Floor logo. This logo was inspired by classic film title cards, which can be seen in the formatting where the production company or distributor “presents” the film and the vintage yet flashy font choice of the main text. The design serves as the actual title card for the short film and the logo seen on the postcard. The postcard is meant to attract audiences to watch the premiere of the film and provides the handle for our social media account for them to check out if they want to learn more. While it is intentionally minimal to conceal plot details, the postcard subtly illustrates the Protagonist taking on different roles and controlling the story as seen through the production credits and photograph on the front side. As a whole, the frequent use of movie-related imagery across all three components of the portfolio project embeds our brand into film culture.
Despite this direction, there are improvements to be made with the branding. For one, it is difficult to market the short film considering how dense it is. The brand image is largely held together by its use of film references and meta content, as finding another cohesive way to market all the genres into one package is tough. Our solution for the social media account was to have posts of the scenes be distinct in content to match the specified genre, yet consistent due to the composition of the page. Each row of posts for a scene is covered left-to-right with the scene heading, a line from the Narrator, and another line from the Protagonist. Through the self-referential captioning written for these posts, we were also able to connect each scene to the secret narrative of the film in an amusing manner. This tactic built a sense of humor, diversity, and mystery around the production, but if perceived poorly, it might ultimately lead to confusion. In order for the brand to work, those viewing our products will need to understand that it is a fusion of these concepts instead of being misled into thinking they are separate. On the whole, I think we did our best with branding regardless of these issues and hope that it is effectively communicated to audiences.
By the same token, we desire that audiences are as well able to understand that our short film, through an unconventional lens, discusses the uncertainty of self-identity while being trapped into a box by the expectations of modern-day society. A substantial amount of young people can relate to the same struggle of feeling lost in understanding who they are. This includes the Protagonist of the piece, who is incessantly being forced by the Narrator into different roles to fit any given script. The conclusion of the film, which has the Protagonist commence writing their own narrative with complete creative freedom, is representative of the desire to break free from these expectations and to truly become one’s self. I believe my group and I were able to build upon this topic in an extremely creative manner that is unique from other films that tackle these struggles of self-discovery. Our goal is that audience members will not only enjoy the short, but also be reminded that they should live on their terms and tell their own story.
In conclusion, my portfolio project is an inventive take on the coming-of-age formula that is told through the world of film. It is striking, introspective, and passionate. I have never dedicated as much time, thought, and effort into any single production in my creative career as I have with this one, and is a production I completely dedicated myself to. As I now release my work into the world, I am confident that this is the end of another chapter in my own story.
