Draft Feedback

Recently I have sent a draft of my film review of "Isn't it Romantic?" to my teacher Miss Zoe for feedback. Instead of a written feedback she chose to speak to me via Blackboard Collaborate. She had some problems with my review that I sent in that she wanted to discuss with me about personally.

Miss Zoe did not find a clear argument in the review; the thing I'm talking about to get the reader interested into the movie.

In my original draft, the structure was comparing the set design and characters as I summarized the first act of the film, but after a second viewing it did not look very good when there are an assortment of analysis scattered across the paragraphs. I tried to cram talking about the world design and characters together, but it ended up as a mess. This was the result of trying to imitate Owen Gleiberman's work, but I then realized after getting feedback that I had to make this work an original piece, a piece that is written with my own words.

I deleted the entire main body paragraphs and conclusions to start over, but kept and modified most of the introduction as it has a synopsis that explains the film in short. I decided that I should cover the characters in the film, both their "real-life" versions and the rom-com versions that are seen mainly on screen. For this, I consulted a book about writing titled "A Short Guide to Writing About Film" written by Timothy Corrigan (2014). I looked up how to write about the characters in the film, which I discussed in a  previous post about my further research. Instead of trying to cover multiple elements to the movie, I am focusing solely on the characters, how they are different to their respective counterparts, and what role they play in the film.

The book discusses the process of analyzing a character, notably deducing whether or not a character is supposed to be seen as realistic or not. This was noted as the characters are both realistic and non-realistic, so I can look at their characters from both angles in my review. The way that a character can be analysed is through their appearance, their behavior, how they speak, and how they fit among their setting. This way of thinking will help me to break down the characters of the film and write about them in my review.

One of the pieces of feedback that I received is that I did not add a reference list to the end of the review. Despite film reviews being informal pieces, I was advised to create a reference list at the end to support whatever points or quotations that were presented in the review. To start off, I began by putting references to IMDb for the film itself as well as the actors' pages when I cite their previous well-known roles. I will also use in-text citations in the document, but I feel like the references should be removed when I transfer them to a flipbook to present on my Wix website.

My first draft can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1heb-tKrcswnOk62ffAfLBzEACQVN23ic/view?usp=sharing

References

CORRIGAN, T. (2014) A Short Guide to Writing About Film. 9^th ed. Harlow: Pearson Education.