My evaluation

As today's deadline approaches, I have ensured that I looked over my blog to check that everything has been included and it has. This means that I have now completely finished.

Sorraya

iMovie

Here is a iMovie tutorial which is really helpful and explains how we edited our software to create our final piece. When looking at the tutorial you can see how professional the software is and how it has allowed us to create our film. iMovie was a very beneficial software to have and without it our film wouldn't be the same. The numerous special effects and transitions on iMovie allowed us as a group to play around with different effects and add these to our film, eventually reaching a conclusion on what looks and works best for us. We found some highly effective transitions (for example when Annabel's eyes are moving frantically across the screen, there is a dissolve transition from that to her walking through the woods. Overall, iMovie was a very useful and professional software.

Above is the example that was previously mentioned of the characters extreme close up shot having a dissolve transition onto the next shot of her walking through the woods. This is the midpoint of the dissolve as both shots are on screen.

Sorraya

So Far..

At this time i have almost finished my evaluation after completing my prezi presentation last night. This means that all i have to complete is my question 5 then my evaluation will be complete. This means adding the extras and talk about the feedback we recieved with our film.

Samantha

Things to work on for the future

For future references, I think the main aspects that I need to work on improving are the soundtrack and carefully considering my location choice. The fact that the weather delayed our filming so much means that in the future, I would preferably choose an inside location because it means that we wouldn't be delayed as much in terms of filming and this would give my group more time to focus on editing. Not only this, filming in a public location means that you cannot guarantee privacy, however we did not suffer greatly from this. In terms of our soundtrack, compared to other films made by students in the previous years, I feel that our soundtrack lacked variety. Although it was a good piece of music, it did not vary greatly throughout our entire film and because of this I feel the music did lack slightly. Therefore, in regards to future filming, I would take the time to carefully consider where I'm filming, the problems that may occur because of this, the variety of my music and how much time we have left to complete our music.

Sorraya. 

What have you learned?

Overall, I think doing this exercise has taught me a lot about how to control a camera and how to create effective shots that portray things such as power, weakness ad equality. Without this exercise, I wouldn't of been able to fully understand how useful these shots are. Compared to my preliminary exercise, I have learnt a lot more about creating a continuity cut as my editing on the preliminary exercise was extremely poor. I think I worked a lot harder and payed a lot more attention to detail when editing the footage and this resulted in a realistic looking film because there weren't any major jumps. In this exercise, our entire group spent a lot of time filming and this enabled me to take a lot more care when filming to ensure that my shots were good enough and matched our standards. Because of this, we ended up having some good shots in our film. I think learning these has given me the experience needed to film projects in the future (e.g. media A2 music video) and because of this I feel pleased that this exercise has made me more skillful in both recording and editing.

Sorraya

What was difficult about this project?

When looking back, I think the most difficult/challenging aspect of producing our film was the fact that we had chosen to film outside. The thing we hadn't thought about was how predictable the weather was going to be and because of this, we suffered a lot of setbacks when it came to producing our film. On our first filming schedule, the heavy downpour of snow meant we couldn't film due to continuity errors that would occur if we had to re-film. Also, on many other occasions, the heavy rain made it difficult for us to film certain scenes and to even use our camera equipment incase it broke. Because of these difficulties, we ended up very rushed for time to finish filming, whilst many others within our class had finished all of their filming. We did actually manage to have our film done on time, but the weather certainly delayed us and meant we weren't able to finish our filming on the times we had hoped for.  I found that when it came to filming, it was also difficult to exactly replicate all the shots we had intended to do. This is because whilst we filmed we also thought about how we would then take this footage to make a continuity edited piece, so when filming certain shots, I struggled to see whether or not the shot was good enough to be in the film. However, because of this, we ended up filming many takes of the same shot and this meant we did not have to go back to re-film shots we had already done because even though we may have faulted in one shot, we had filmed another replica to replace it.

Sorraya.

Looking back - Changes that we made

When looking back at our initial film story line, several aspects have been changed. Our original idea was to have our title sequence to take place within a house. The idea was to have lights flickering, music playing randomly etc. However our feedback from our class mates suggested to us that the house in our title sequence was unexplainable as they didn't know whose house it was and what relevance it had to do with the film. Not only this, we also decided to have the character holding a knife because we wanted to have a severe threat within the film. However, it was revealed to us again through audience feedback that there was no explanation as to how the character gets a knife. This resulted in a big change for our film title sequence because the entire plan of it needed to be different. From this we concluded that the shots which revealed names of actors, producers etc would all have the font written on what appears to be a burning book. And even though we kept factors such as lights flickering, we made sure that this happened in an empty room so that it gave the appearance of the character being in a mental asylum. Overall, this ended up being a better option because it made more sense to the viewer and after showing the title sequence to the viewers, there were no criticisms relating to it not making sense. We also decided to remove the knife because this was unneeded and only left the audience confused. In conclusion, I think the changes we made as a group benefitted our film as they allowed us to make our film clearer and more believable for the audience. I think the large amount of planning and preparation that we did made filming a lot more easier because whenever we were unsure as to what we were doing, we could always look back at our shot list/story board etc to find out exactly what shot type and scene we should be filming.

Sorraya