Final Cut

To finalise this blog I am now going to embed the final cut of the film as the last post to reflect on what was achieved during the corse.

Evaluation Question 4

How did you use new media technologies in the research, construction, planning and evaluation stages?

As a whole there were a lot of different media technologies which I used to present all of the the stages throughout the process. To start I shall discuss all the different technologies I have used during the research.

Here is a collage of all of the product used in the research stages.

1) Final Cut Express - This has been used multiple times during the research stages as it has been used to create our Animatic, Film Pitches and Production Team Discussion. This therefore helped us achieve all of our film editing needs to a good standard. For the animatic in particular it enabled us to estimate the duration of the film as we were able to put all the stills into a sequence and estimate each shot length. Here is a screenshot from where we have been editing our film.

2) Slide Share - This piece of software online came in handy as it enabled me to share any presentations onto the blog. One of the things I used this for was the presentation which I used to explain my film idea, I believe it was necessary to put this on my blog as it allowed people to look through the presentation more clearly while i talk about it as it wasn't very clear in the video. Another thing i used it for was to display the conventions which are shown in the 'IN CINEMAS' magazine review in 'Empire'. A problem witht his software is that if you were to insert any videos, sound or hyperlinks, they would no longer work and would just look like a picture to an viewer. Here is a screen shot of all of the presentations I have hosted on Slide Share to post on the blog.

http://www.slideshare.net/ho1mes1996

3) Soundtrack Pro - All the sound in the animatic was created using this programme this helped give the audience and idea of what was happening in each still as the images wouldn't make sense alone as it doesn't show any movement in the shots, therefore the software enables us to achieve the movement in shots through the use of footsteps and other folio sounds. Once we created the soundtrack we would then attach it the the sequence in Final Cut. We didn't seem to have many problems with this apart from the fact it is very time consuming. Here is a screenshot showing us editing the sound on Soundtrack Pro.

4) Blogger - Blogger has given a platform in which we can display all of our work allowing us to create better ways to present it, increasing the creativity. This technology has also made it much easier to do coursework as it is all done online where we can embed relevant pictures, videos, audio, etc. A problem which I have seemed to have with the evaluation questions in particular with this technology is resizing videos but apart from this Blogger has been very useful for our posts. As you can see I was also able to personalise this blog to my own preferences changing backgrounds and colours.

5) Photoshop - This was used in the research of the ancillary products when we were developing our skills and showing our use of the conventions in different products as we created a magazine front cover. For the cover I used Photoshop to create both the title and the create different layers to put the focus of the image in the background over the title, to follow conventions closely. A negative to this software is that it isn't simple to use if you haven't had any previous experience hence why I did most of the photoshop work as I have used photoshop a lot. Here is an example of how I used photoshop to edit our movie poster.

6) PhotoBucket - I have used this to post photographs which i had taken on my phone onto the blog as it was the easiest and quickest way to upload and embed the photos. These photos would include the one of the research post order and the 'shooting on location' photographs. This has made posting photos from my phone easier as I can share them on this site and then download or embed them. If I embedded them though it wasn't always successful so the embedding isn't brilliant on this software but it is a great hosting website.

7) Prezi - I used Prezi for the animatic post as I felt like I needed to use a different way of presenting my blog posts. I thought this would be ideal as you can include multimedia in the presentation which you can't otherwise do on Microsoft PowerPoint. Therefore I can include videos, sound recordings, links,etc. I used this for both my animatic and I am currently creating one for this evaluation question. All in all this is easy to use but can be time consuming and frustrating when creating the navigation. Here is the Prezi I created for my animatic.

8) Storyboard Quick - This was used for the animatic only. It allowed me to add characters to the pictures i took in the three locations from the storyboard and then upload them as storyboard frames and add people to the photographs. I personally wouldn't use this to create a whole story board from scratch as the amount of things you can do is limited with not enough locations, avatars, etc. This is a piece of software which is shown in the animatic as i took the pictures and inserted the avatars.

9) YouTube - This was the most ideal way to host videos and also embed videos as uploading the videos straight from the Mac to the blog wouldn't work. To over come this I hosted the videos on youtube and then embedded them from there. A negative about embedding from youtube is that you cannot resize them easily on blogger as it is different to resizing pictures which is much easier. Here is a screenshot of all the YouTube videos I have created for our project.

10) Microsoft Word/PowerPoint - Word was used for making any documents which are seen on the blog. One document which was created on this for example was the film treatment. this software allowed us to created a treatment just like ones which i had found on Google images so we had the same style and could follow all the general conventions which you would usually see. PowerPoint was used to create my presentation about my film idea. This was helpful when I tried to explain my film pitch to my peers.

11) Sound Cloud - This was used for an audio recording when I read out the treatment. This is helpful as it gave me another way to present the work some people prefer to read, others prefer to listen so this enabled me to give the variety to suit some peoples preferences. Here is the voice recording I did of myself reading out our film treatment.

12) Sony HD Camera - We used this camera to test out different ways of slowing down the footage. Using this camera we found out that there is a slow-motion setting which processes the clip automatically on the camera by increasing the number of frames. This camera gave us a variety of choice when deciding how we were going to film the slowed down parts of out film (the smashing glass). Before shooting on location we decided to test this mode on the camera and created a video showing the comparison between the slow motion mode on the camera and slowing it down on Final Cut.

13) Quark Xpress -  Quark express was used for the research of the ancillary products as it helped broaden our knowledge on this new software and helped us create a professional looking film review and poster for our own film. This product is similar to photoshop as it takes a while to learn all the different tools but we used a youtube tutorial to give us an idea of all the basics. Here is the tutorial we used and also the film poster I made after following it to see if I could develop my skills even further.

14) Scribd - This is where you can share all the documents you have created so that you can embed them onto the blog. Therefore this has enabled us to be able to get all the documents we have created on to our blogs without having to alter it in any way. One thing I used it for was to embed our film treatment to show the conventions I had included as it is a professional document. Here is an embedded copy of the treatment.

15) Keynote - This is another piece of software for making presentations and I used this to create the presentation which I showed at the start of the course when I was talking about my film idea and pitching it to the rest of the class. This helped me get the story line across and made it much more easier for the group to understand the concept. Here is the video of me talking about the idea with the presentation in the background.

To show all the software which helped with the construction stages I have created a Prezi which should help display new technologies more clearly through pictures, video and sound.

Distribution, Sharing and Embedding Stages

One of the most obvious technologies we have used in this process is YouTube. YouTube is the largest video hosting website on the internet and to prove this I have found a video which gives you an idea of why we have chosen this to host all of the videos created in our Production.

So YouTube boasts all of these great features but for us it has enabled us to share all of the videos created including production team discussions, rough cuts, final cuts, animatics, etc. Another useful feather of YouTube is that you can easily embed videos from YouTube onto our blogs which made it much easier to post but a downside to this is it can take a long time for our longer videos to upload and can therefore be time consuming. Also we could invite people to watch our film through our YouTube link and were able to also share it with anyone else who would stumble across it.

Other pieces of technology which came unhandy were those which enabled us to post and embed documents, presentations and soundtracks onto our blogs as blogger cannot host these alone. A site we used for documents was Scribd. this website allows users to host documents on their site for free, once you have posted this on the site you can then easily create an embed code and alter it to your own preferences or needs. Here is a screen shot of the embedding options which Scribd gives.

From this you can see that you can alter the size of the embedded document. decide which pages you want to be showing first and also how you want the viewer to navigate through your documents. As our review in this screenshot was only one page the navigation wasn't important.

The site we used to host our presentations on was Slideshare. This did the same as Scribd but for presentations where you could still keep the format of your presentation when posting. A negative of this is that you cannot see any animation just stills of each slide one after the other. This was still very useful though as I created a few presentations which needed to be posted onto my blog and this enabled this so that I could then embed it quickly with no fuss.

The final piece of embedding technology was Sound Cloud which I used to host, share, embed and create any sound recordings. The embeds from this site had a nice layout which looked rather appealing. I chose this over other technologies as I was much more familiar with it and therefore found it easy to use and less time consuming.

Evaluation Stages

I have created a presentation showing all the technologies in the evaluation stages of our film production process.

This is the last evaluation question and all in all I would say the whole process of making the film and both the ancillary products has been reasonably easy with barely any problems encountered. All of this was made easier and more possible with all of the different technologies which were available to us.

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learnt from your Audience Feedback?

In this evaluation question I am going to be talking about the different forms of feedback which we received for all of our products. Here is a video of me explaining how we did our audience feedback.

Now that you have an idea of how we got our feedback I will now go through the things I mentioned at the end of the video.

First of all I am going to discuss our Target Audience Profile (TAP). Our TAP was created through not only personal thoughts but also from facts and statistics from other films within the same genre, style,etc. Pearl and Deans website was very useful as it helped give us an idea of what age ranges were most likely to watch romance films and from what social background they were from. Once we had got a general idea of the age range we should aim our product towards we then made a decision. Our decision was that females would be more likely to watch our romance. Here is the summary of our typical target audience member.

There is also a entire post on our TAP so if you would like to view that click here

The films which we looked at to help us decide this were feature length films 'Safe Haven' and 'The Vow'. Both of these films proved that romances have a majority of female audience members. Safe Haven's audience stats proved this with 76% being female. Knowing this helped us understand whether audiences would find our short appealing and this would also give our reviewers an idea also of who we are aiming our film at.

So I have already explained how we gathered our audience feedback and all in all I would say it was rather successful. I think the range of different ages and genders gave us lots of different personal opinions to look upon when showing our rough cut/draft of our products. I also believe the success of this was because the feedback we were given wasn't biased as the group were giving us honest critique, whereas if we got our close friends and family to look at our products they may not have criticised and questioned things as much as our peers did. I will now repost both our rough cut which we showed our peers and also the video I created of our peers which were giving us our audience feedback.

From this video you can see how we received our feedback as we gave our reviewers whiteboards to jot things down and recorded it for future reference incase we forgot or didn't pick up on something mentioned the first time round. When re editing we could also look back on this to make sure we had took into account all of our possible improvements.

Once we got our feedback we consider most things which were suggested, especially creating the new narrative as this was an important aspect of the film which needed to be corrected. Having this discussion helped give us multiple new suggestions of other ways of how we can approach this and from the final cut you can see that we opted for a completely new narrative with the voice over. 

Dubbing the lines was one thing suggested which I didn't think of before getting our audience feedback so this helped me realise that the audio wasn't as good as it could be. Therefore we spent a lot of time dubbing all of the actors lines and putting them into the soundtrack. we also along with this made adjustments to the volume of some of the sound effect and the duration. Here is an example of one piece of dialogue being dubbed for the final cut comparing the audio from the rough cut.

Rough cut dialogue & Final cut dialogue

 The audience feedback has made a big difference to our film as the final cut and the rough cut are like two different films as the audiences reactions and suggestions helps you realise what would be more suitable for the audience rather than what we want and how we vision the film so it enables you to see it through an audience members point of view.

If you look at both our rough cut and final cut you will realise that the audience feedback has had a large influence on the final cut as the whole narrative and order of shots has been completely changed, making them look like two separate films. Here are the rough cut and final cut to show this change.

Rough Cut

Final Cut

I am now going discuss the importance of the audience feedback in terms of our ancillary product. As I explained in the video we got our peers to look at our ancillary product and asked if they could use the mark scheme to give each category a level. We then got them to say why they have chosen these levels and how we could improve it to get into the top bands. When getting this feedback we didn't create any footage but I will post the rough cut of our poster and the mark scheme to give an idea of how we were getting our feedback. I will also screenshot the post where I discussed the feedback which we got.

As you can see the feedback, although all minor improvements, helped out with the style of the poster but also got us to look further into conventions, especially with the star ratings as I looked back at other posters to ensure that it is a general convention on multiple posters. All in all the feedback we received was edited into the poster and here is the final draft for our short film poster.

I am also going to do the exact same thing now with our magazine review now showing the rough cut, feedback and final cut. We had generally good feedback from our rough cut so there were only small improvements. The rough cut had laurel ipsum just to give our audience an idea of the layout of text when the article is written.

We could have opted for different styles of audience feedback with only people who fit perfectly into our TAP but this may not be the best idea as although they are our target audience they would all have generally similar opinions on the film so wouldn't suggest anything different or new, therefore having a mix of genders and age ranges enabled us to have multiple opinions and also we could see weather they actually enjoyed the film or not along with our target audience.

In conclusion audience feedback plays an important part in this process as it can help you strengthen and improve a project which you may have thought beforehand was finished and completed. You are then able to add their suggestions if necessary and attempt to make your product as good as it can be.

I am now going to be answering the final evaluation question which is all about the different technologies I have used for each stage of the process from the research stages to the evaluation questions.

Evaluation question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

To help me answer this question I have created a directors commentary which involves me talking about things in the film like sound, costume, lighting, transitions,etc.

Moving on from this I shall now discuss how our film poster and magazine review complements some of the things mentioned in this commentary. I am first going to post a picture of our magazine poster and then I shall say how the poster advertises and compliments our short film. Here is our finished film poster.

The pictures in this post complement our film as it shows the actors which are going to be in our film but also I editing them to make the lighting look much brighter to match the type of high-key lighting which we used in our film. The actors can also help advertise our film as with many films people sometimes watch them because of the cast not the storyline.

The White font and text is also used as we have a lot of fades to white throughout the film so it is sticking to a general colour scheme. I chose the three different background colours as the background for the centre picture is the colour which the top and bottom background colours make when you mix them together.

I am now going to post a video which I created of me discussing the conventions of romance posters and how they represent romance films in particular through their images, fonts, colours, etc.

So as you can see from this video we ourselves have followed the general conventions. Here are the following conventions which I have included in our poster:-

1. Our picture shows the two main characters (Faith & Olly) looking at one another. This is shown in every romance poster which I have seen as it shows the protagonist and the love interest together. This also complements our film as it shows everyone the two main characters in the film so it gives an insight into who's story they are going to be following
2. The Title is big, bold and clear but matches the light colours which other posters have used as we have opted for white as it brightens up the poster and gives it a more 'happy' feel. Whereas black font duelled the poster. This could complement the film as everyone know the title of the film as it is the first thing you see and there is a lot of bright light and white fades in the film.
3. The Steel Tongs font at the bottom is clear and includes all the conventions of the poster talking about different people involved in making the film, including the director which can be a strong influence in mainstream films as people may thing the film would be good if they have watched another film by the same director. This complements our film therefore through the names of the people working on this film.
4. The tagline we chose gives a little insight into our film as it is 'second chance at love' and in the film she does end up meeting the love interest twice but in different ways but similar outcomes so in a way she has two chances to meet him.

You can see our own conventions in more detail on the Ancillary Product 2 Page

Here is our magazine review which we have created for our film. I am now going to do the same thing as i have done with the poster showing how the review works hand in hand with the film.

Now that I have embedded the magazine review I am also going to show the general conventions of a film poster in a slideshow which I created and then show these conventions being shown in mine.

1. The photograph we have used in our review hints the events and outcomes which are going to occur in the film so these compliment one another as it shows that the two characters end up getting married but don't know how they meet so they know that it is going to be a happy outcome and a positive film.
2. The title of the film is very clear in the article as it is the largest font and is in block capitals. This helps the audience to recognise and remember the title as it will be the very first thing which they read in the article.
3. The drop box gives a bit of insight into what people already think about the film as its generally a quote from the passage or even a reviewers comment. Our drop box is a small comment about the shots and actors so this would help attract audiences to the film as they will watch it with this quote/review in mind.
4. The 'Closer Look' box on top of the picture gives a small insight into the construction and behind the scenes parts of the film. These are just small things for people to mention while watching the film and could be slightly interesting.
5. The written article talks all about the film including things like camera work, actors, plot, overall thoughts, etc. This would promote the movie as long as it is a good review about the film this would help advertise a film a lot as people who wouldn't think to watch the film may decide to watch it just because they read something good about it in a magazine.

You can see more information on the page all about Ancillary Task 1 page.

I am now going to be discussing evaluation question 3 which is all about audience feedback including how we approached it, how successful it was and whether we took it on board.

Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

To answer this question I have created two key frame images with 9 frames in each. The first with stills from existing media and the second  with stills from our own short film. I have created each frame to help explain different parts of the film. This will include the following - 

1. Camera shots/angles
2. Lighting
3. Composition
4. Costume
5. Editing
6. Acting
7. Locations
8. Soundtrack
9. Credits/titles

I am also going to be posting videos which include footage from our short, showcasing all 9 criteria throughout our short. Here are the two key frame documents which I have created.

Existing Media

Own Media

1. Camera shots/Angles

The first frame is all about the different types of camera shots and angles which we have used in our film. I have found another short called 'The Anti Social Network' which includes similar angles and framework as our own. The phone in particular shown from the short is almost identical to the shot used in our own, using the rule of thirds, as the phone isn't central but slightly to the right. Our film also has a variety of shots types throughout. I have noticed that most short films have more creative shots with a lot of movement. Therefore we have followed this convention within our own camerawork. Overall I think that the camera work as a whole has been very successful with a large variety of different shot types. Here is a clip I have created with some of the different angles which we have opted for.

The start of this video involves the opening sequence where our protagonist gets out of bed. The shot I would like to focus on in particular is the one where she opens the curtains as this shot involved a lot of creativity. We purposely chose to shoot her opening the curtains from behind to show the empty space, showing she is on her own (lonely). We tried to keep the shot within the rule of thirds and she then proceeds to open the curtain.

The shot of our actor rushing up the ramp was purposely done hand held as it helped exhaderate movement and displays the unorganised side to our character. This shot follows conventions of short films as I have seen several which have handheld camera work in them.

2. Lighting

Throughout our film we wanted to have relatively bright/high-key lighting. A benefit was that when we filmed outside for the train station sequence the sun was shining which gave an art house style to our shots. We wanted bright lighting to complement the genre of our film as the bright lighting would give off happy vibes to our audience. I found a film which had similar lighting to ours and also took advantage of the sun in the shots with a few lens flares and silhouettes. This gives a similar style to our own although the film from the existing media (short film, Proximity) is a different genre. As you can see in the screen shot there is a person in focus with the sun behind them in both shots giving more of a cinematography look and style. The way we adapted this from the existing media would be that we have involved it in a new genre.

Here are some other lighting effects which we have used in our film including shots which were filmed indoors to show our use of high-key lighting and also how we played around with the lighting in the transition as we transformed the bright light from the curtains, into a white fade.

I have not seen a similar transition where they use light but I have seen many transitions which are done through the movement or actions of a character. Therefore our use of lighting in the opening sequence challenged the ways of which shorts use transitions. Our choice of lighting is clearly demonstrated in the majority of shots as we felt it would be completely necessary to give the right vibe to the audience as brightness can also have connotations of positivity and happiness.

3. Composition

When looking at the composition I am focusing more on the position of the actors within the shots. The compositions shown in these two frames are similar in the way that the actor in the background has walked into focus while the actor nearest to the camera is walking out of shot. This shows that we can make close comparisons with the compositions as the same type of composition and movement of actors is shown in this short called 'Mistletoe'. We have used a lot of over the shoulder shots when the actors are doing their dialogue and this is a very common shot type used in all media when two characters are having a conversation. Here are some of these shots which we have used.

A shot composition I would like to talk about is near the end where they are both facing in each other and they are being shot from the side. This shows the chemistry between the and also there reactions when they are speaking to each other so I think this compositions was effective and also when they are walking away from camera the two man shot shows that the characters feel comfortable around one another.

4. Costume & Props

When choosing costumes it didn't take long to work out that we would need formal wear as both charachters are travelling to a place of work for an interview. Therefore we opted for a shirt and tie for our male character and a pencil skirt and dark coloured vest top for our female. Formal wear is also showcased in the short film 'Sight' where the two main characters go on a date but there is a difference in setting. The costume would be based more on stereotypes rather than conventions as we opted for the stereotypical formal work wear and the existing media have chosen formal wear for a different occasion.

Here is some footage which shows more of the costumes in our short. As you can see from this short they also have glasses as props although they are used in different ways in the film one of our pictures in the end show the two characters having a drink together.

In the shots we actually see the female character. Faith, pick out her formal wear and also put on a formal coat and bag. This shows that we put a lot of thought into costume as we included the coat and bag for when she was outside. Both actors wore coats in the train station scene and both wore their formal wear underneath.

Some important props which we used were the jewellery and lipstick as it showed the audience a bit more insight into the character as it could have shown vanity, femininity, wealth and with the colour of the lipstick, lust. Other props were there to move the plot forward. A good example of a prop which moves to plot forward in an existing film would be the black hole as the piece of paper which he prints is when the character starts to cause all of the mischief which results in him getting in trouble. This is similar to our glass as when she smashes the glass or when she drops the pen the plot is moved forward as they bot lead to the main plot point of meeting her love interest.

5. Editing

In the kitchen sequence we opted for some rather fast pace editing as we felt that these shots didn't need much screen time to illustrate that she is making breakfast. This is very similar in another short called 'Anti Social network'. Therefore we have followed conventions as I believe that because this is a short these shots are just to show what the actor is doing but by doing it fast you are not wasting the screen time which could revolve around the plot. A feature length film also has similar editing as in  'Shaun of the dead' the main character, played by Simon Pegg. gets ready and the shots are very fast pace, one after the other. Here is a video which included some more editing techniques we used including our white fades.

We chose white fades although not very common because we felt that it was a good way of showing a  change in time as these along with the resin helped increase the understanding of the almost complicated story line.

6. Acting

When it came to acting we wanted there to be some form of on screen chemistry between the two actors as we wanted the romance to be believed by the audience. This was made successful the facial expressions of the actors and the way they react to the lines. Short film 'Sight' would be a good example of this style of reliable acting as the protagonist is playing a dating app where he is trying to get the love interest to like him and her reactions are his way of working this out in one part of the film. As you can see in the frames both females seem happy to be in the others company as they are both smiling and seem fully engaged. Here are some photos from the end of our film which increase the believability of our actors actually being in love as they are both smiling and laughing at one another.

7. Locations

We had a total of 3 locations in our film, the bedroom and kitchen, which were both at the same house, the corridor of offices and finally the train station. In these two frames you can see the train station is common in other films also. A noticeable difference would be that we have much more greenery in ours location, following our romance theme as there are brighter colours in comparison to the dull colours shown in the station from the existing film. This would therefore mean that we train stations are commonly showcased in existing products as there are a few other films which also include outdoor train stations. This location was obviously already like this without us having to change it but in the bedroom sequence we had to involve the feminine products on the chest of draws which includes the lipstick and jewellery by doing this we gained a bit more characterisation through the decor of the room as well. Here is a video which shows footage from all of our locations.

8. Soundtrack

Part of our soundtrack for our final cut included a voice over, giving the short a brand new narrative increasing the ability for the audience to follow the plot. As our film was a romance we had our main character reminiscing on the day she had met her partner. Safe Haven, which is a romance film. also has a voice over at the end where the woman is reading a letter. This makes our films similar as they both help to tell the story through the same narrative. I have included footage from both our voice overs and Safe Havens.

9. Titles/Credits

When doing the credits for our film I actually looked through a few shorts just to give me an idea of how I could lay them out and what roles I should include in them. 'Whats Virgin Mean?' seemed to have the better, more noticeable credits as it followed the conventions in general media of the scrolling text. Therefore in this case I followed the conventions very closely from the style and layout to the movement of text. Here is a video of our credits and also the titles shown at the start of the film.

In conclusion we have followed the conventions with much ease as with most decisions we made we would tend to look at existing media to give us some ideas of how we can approach it. We did this a few times with things like the voice over and the credits a specially as we needed an idea of how were were going to lay out the credits and also how we were going to approach the voice over.

I am now going to be looking at evaluation question 2 where I shall be looking at the combination of both our main product and our ancillary product and discussing how they complement one another.

Final Cut

In this post i am going to be embedding a copy of our final cut and explaining what differences have been made from the rough cut stage to the final product

After re-editing all the footage I exported our final cut and hosted on youtube to hopefully present it to our target audience. Here is the embedded final cut from youtube.

To create this final cut I had to put in a lot of hours. The main change to our film would be our narrative as we had to create a voice over and change the order in which the story was told. We also dubbed all the lines and rearranged the sequence which resulted in us re-arranging the soundtrack also.

Now that I have completed the final cut and also completed the ancillary product 1(magazine review and ancillary product 2 (magazine poster) which are posted on separate pages which I have created links for, I can now move onto evaluating all of the work which I have created. The first evaluation question I will be answering is all about whether our film follows or challenges conventions of existing media.

Re-shoots and Re-edits

In this post I am going to say what processes we have gone through to improve the rough cut and turn it into the final cut. 

When making changes we didn't do any re-shooting as one thing which was said multiple times in our feedback was that the film was very well shot so we felt there was no need to change any shots. 

The major changes which we have done is in the editing as we have done the following : - 

1. Change the sequence of the footage to improve the meaning to the audience
2. Add a bit of a voice over narrative
3. Change the length of the shots
4. Edit the photographs at the end.
5. Edit the soundtrack to fit the new sequence

The sequence of the film would be the biggest change because rather than the film going in and out of one sequence to another I changed it so it went through the one sequence but before showing the ending of the first sequence we rewound it back to her getting her hair ready, then the whole of the second sequence including her meeting the love interest then the voice over will be reminiscent of the first sequence and then the outcome to the first sequence will be shown giving it its happy ending resolving its equilibrium. The film now makes much more sense with the sequence change alone. Here is a picture i have made to show the new sequence by saying which is the first sequence/timeline and which is the second.

The voice over which we added was done in one evening, I drafted some lines before hand and go our actor to read them out in a particular way and she did this with ease and we managed to do it without any problems arising.

I changed some of the length of the shots including the ident at the start as it seemed too long and also the shot of the protagonist walking up-to the train station. 

The photographs at the end were edited using photoshop to give them frames. I did this by drawing a box around the photo, inverting the selection and erasing the inverse to give it a frame. This was successful as it gives the photographs an authentic look.

With the new sequence of shots I will need to change the soundtrack. I have altered the existing sound by rearranging ti to fit, shortening the sounds which were originally too long like the one mentioned in the rough cut (Duvet rustling for too long) and even took some of the sound out as it seemed to unrealistic.

Rough Cut & Feedback

In this post i am going to be posting the rough cut. I am then going to be posting a video i created of the feedback we got from the rough cut, writing a break down of what was said and what we are then going to do the improve these things.

The rough cut was made on both Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro and then posted on the youtube before we showcased and exhibited it to the rest of the class. Here is the rough cut of 'Love, Fate, Destiny'.

While the other production ten had seen this for the first time the we gave them whiteboards to jot the thoughts and notes to feedback to us. We decided the best way to document this would be to record them talking about it and then play the parts which they were talking about. Here is the feedback we received from them.

I think from this the main thing we found out was that the narrative wasn't translating properly to the audience which meant the meaning wasn't apparent to our audience which would be the most important part of the film and would need adapting as this is part of the marking criteria.

Ways in which we are going to change this are by first, changing the order of the sequence so there isn't too many confusing transitions from one timeline to another. This should hopefully improve the understanding of the two story lines. A second thing which we are going to do is include a rewind. this would also be complemented by a voice over as the voiceover will guide the audience through the narrative so before the rewind starts we are going to have our protagonist question what else could have possibly happened that day. Hopefully this should help us get past this issue.

I think that the information given from our peers was not only helpful but very constructive giving new ideas to adapt things like the sequence of the footage, the types of sound we should include or get rid of and what they actually enjoyed about the film so we knew the things we should definitely keep.

Another reasonably important task is to dub the actors lines as the ones at the train station especially were muffled and not clear enough. To over come this we will be getting both actors to do some voice recordings where they read there lines from the script and we try to match this to the video footage and hopefully this will be successful.

More minor points which we shall pick up on are the few soundtrack issues by removing some of the sound as our peers said it was sometimes too 'over the top' and 'unrealistic'. I will also shorten some of the sounds which were also brought up during the feedback.

Things which I shall do to improve the films mise-en-scene is to add borders to the photographs at the end to give it more of a photo albums style so the audience know that they are watching the two characters as they live their lives together.

Now we have a few pointers and adaptations to turn our rough cut in to the final product so I am now going to use all of the criticism given and put this into our final cut by doing some re-edits, changing the length and volume of some sounds and including new voice overs and dubbing the lines.

Now that we have our tough cut I can now make a final cut and post it onto here. In the next post I am going to both post the final cut and then talk about the parts I changed and how that has changed the groups opinions.