As Evaluation: ED

Digital Technologies


For our filming process we had difficulties with spacing as the rooms in the house we used were quite small and sometimes getting enough in the frame was an issue using a different location would have been a good way around this but for our video a small homey environment was ideal aesthetically. I believe our blogger profile was quite well done however personally I can improve this buy posting a bit more content as Elle and Kate had contributed a lot more to the blogger process. We were really quite good at researching and had a broad range of example movies and title sequences this really helped us to get a better idea of what our film needed and different processes we could use. Inside of final cut we manipulated our film quite a lot and used a decent range of editing techniques, the most time consuming and effective looking of these was the internet messaging box which popped up in certain communication scenes, and improvement I would of made would be to make the text box similar to that of a familiar social networking site or texting service like apple messages or Facebook.


Creativity:


We had to really take time and think of creative and original ways to set our project aside from others or other films in general, we had focus our film on communication across different platforms and how that can be represented in an extract/opening to a film, we used a popular texting/messaging technique text boxes and researched how other people had done the most effective was the only text and minimal box used in Sherlock, we went for a similar style but had a very translucent text box and used interesting transitions which worked with the imagery. Another process we used was the split screen which is a way of inserting a shot reverse shot parallel to each other, in a triple split screen telephone conversation. This was effective in our theme of social communication and helped to add effect to the thriller genre as all of the characters reactions and facial expression could be seen at the same time


Research and Planning:


Our group put a fair amount of time and effort in to our research and planning throughout the entire project, from researching films to get initial ideas on what we want our opening sequence to be, and planning how we want our title sequence inside our sequence to look, we researched films like pacific rim, Skyfall, Argo and Mr. Brooks from researching these thrillers we decided upon a simplistic black and white title sequence revealed after our triple split screen, the pinnacle editing piece of our opening sequence from our research a lot of title sequences appear after a key scene or dramatic scene and we gathered that our title sequence would be most effective after this scene, in A2 I intend to match the amount of research and planning I did in As except put more time and effort in to making the quality of the planning and research a lot better.


Post production:
I think when I comes to editing this year sharing out the work load would be the biggest improvement that needs to be done as we let the person in our group with the most technical knowledge of final cut pro do the visual editing and piecing our sequence together, the sound then went to another member of the group, I feel the sound and video would have been a lot smoother if this workload was spread out amongst the group and if everyone took turns and on every aspect as opposed to just one aspect each. I personally have improved my technical final cut pro skills and have looked a lot into filters as a flashback was needed in our film and making that scene look like a flashback required some research into post production editing, I think that diegetic and non-diegetic sound could be improved on next year both the sound levels and timing. The weakest part of our film was finding a song to fit the scene and more time should be put into this, this year.

Using conventions from real media texts:

We used a lot of minor conventions for our project to push it towards the thriller genre the narrative of our film was quite stereotypically thriller as one of our friends had disappeared unexplained, however the use of the flashback helped to really reaffirm this for the viewers, an improvement I would make would have been making it clearer for the viewers that one of the group had disappeared using more dialect would have helped this. We used a lot of low key lighting in a few scenes such as the opening and ending scenes, in the ending scene the low key lighting and very slow pan had a really creepy effect and was an effective convention to use.