Critical Reflection

 Throughout the last eight weeks, I worked along side two classmates to create a comedy short film titled “Out of Hand”. Following others questioning a man named Tom breaking the “unspoken rule” of shaking hands. The people around him come up with creative ideas to make him shake their hands, ultimately succeeding, which leaves the viewer with a huge plot twist in the end of the short film.

This film is set in an office, showing the typical nine-to-five American workplace. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 60% of U.S. employees work in office based jobs, making this setting familiar to a large audience. As a team, we wanted to accurately show an office, so we chose an engineering one in our city. Inside this building stars three characters, all with significant different personalities. There is Alice (played by Andrea) who is a flirt who loves to gossip, Greg (played by Daniel) who is very humorous and nosy, Tom (played by Lito) who is the new guy who doesn’t fit in due to his refusal to shake hands. In the twenty-first century it is expected to shake hands when meeting someone, and seen as “rude” if you do not partake in this tradition. Social norms are a big issue in this age, as statistically Gen-Z has faced lots of judgement by others around the. According to Impact 360, “In all, about one-third (31%) can be categorized as “internally pressured” and one-quarter (25%) as externally pressured.” About two in five of all Gen Z (41%) qualify as at least one or the other.” Tom’s extreme fear of judgement pressured him to hide his fake hand, showing that this anxiety brewing up in people will be a big issue when Gen Z starts talking over the work force. We wanted to show that you should not judge everything you see, as we are all different from each other and that is not a bad thing. 

This film has a social media account to promote, following a red and blue color scheme. We chose this color scheme after researching color schemes from popular comedy movies. According to University of Winnipeg, up to 90% of impulsive judgements about products can be based on color, which is why we took so much time to choose specific colors for our branding. We found that most of these movies have blue, red, or/and yellow and the primary color in their branding. We wanted to really show that this film is comedy, so we chose these colors and followed it with a curvy font in our logo. We emphasized the hand shaking by adding an outline of it into the logo, which foreshadowed what the film is about. 

We made this logo our instagram profile picture, so we could set our brand from as soon as the viewer clicks onto our profile. We continued this throughout our post, using the same color scheme and font, so as soon as someone sees that font in the color red and blue, they know it is Out of Hand. Most posts also included our logo for extra marketing. I do wish we would’ve followed this color scheme more in the film, as none of the costume design or misc-en-scene included these colors. We should’ve taken more time to develop this. In our instagram posts, anytime music played we made sure it was silly music to really show that our film is a comedy. Similar music is shown in the film keeping soundtrack consistent throughout. Next time I will experiment more with sound effects and audio, as we rushed many of the edits and chose sound effects and music so quickly. 

Out of Hand engages the audience by building suspense throughout the duration of the film. We raise the question “Why wont Tom shake anyone’s hands” gives the viewer curiosity which is enough to keep someone watching. We emphasized this by adding many sound effects and suspenseful music when Tom was challenged to do this interaction with his new coworkers. We blended this anxious feeling with comedy to keep the viewed engaged throughout. Alice and Greg have extreme personalities that are very intense as they are very judgmental and nosy in a humorous way. It is extremely common for people to have critical, cliquy coworkers, so it is funny to see an extreme of this in the film. In the end the viewer is hit with a plot twist, which leaves them satisfied with a better understanding on why Tom is so terrified of people touching his prosthetic hand. By the credit scene, many sympathize with him.  

In the early stages of making our film, we talked a lot about the idea of unspoken rules in society, AKA things people do without thinking, for example saying “how are you” or shaking hands. We noticed that in places like the workplace, not doing these things can seem strange. That’s what gave us the idea to focus on something small, like a handshake, and show how it can lead to confusion. While in pre-production of our project, we spent a lot of time researching how comedy shows like The Office and Scrubs and how they are made and marketed.

 These shows are known for their silly stories and dramatic characters, which really helped us decide what kind of things we wanted to include in our own film. For example, we used weird montage scenes and filming styles like the ones in those shows, and we also added lots of awkward moments to make the story funnier. We also got a lot of inspiration we used in production and post production, we watched videos and studied how comedy films are usually shot and edited. This helped us figure out how to pace our scenes and frame our shots to make them feel more dramatic and/or funny. We used these techniques to build quirky, tense moments between characters like Tom and Greg or Tom and Alice.

Overall, our film was a fun project to create, as we were able to show real world issues such as judgement, while also bringing humor to the audience.