Practical Production First Cut/ Feedback

Today we presented the first cut of our production to the class and gained feedback from our teacher and our peers, some of which being our target audience. We gained a range of feedback of both positive and negative. An improvement which we were told we could improve was the shot of Liam when he appeared as alone from 0.44 seconds- 0.52 seconds. When we filmed this shot we tried to create the idea that his mind was oblivious to the people who were trying to reach out to him and contact him, we thought the best technique to create this was to place him in a shot with little Mise en Scene. We came up with a number of ideas how we could improve this shot; one idea that we had is that we could use the time-lapse effect on a shot of Liam appearing in a busy environment. We hope this would show how deeply Liam has been affected by the abduction of his younger brother Alfie. Another idea we came up with would be using the ghosting effect on different shots of Liam and over lapping them into one shot. These shots can reflect the emotions Liam is suffering as a result of his Brothers abduction and his arrest. We were also told we needed to add titles to our sequence in order to improve. We are aware of this and are going to do so at a later date as we are planning to overlap them over a different set of clips.

The positive feedback we gained included music, we were told that the music in our opening sequence was effective and was a strong convention of the horror genre. The majority of our audience also enjoyed the echoed voices layered over the shot of Liam as they thought it was a very effective technique and it did in fact appear that Liam was in a ‘trance’ and was oblivious to everybody. Moving forward we are going to take the constructive criticism into consideration and improve our work to the best of our ability. We had issues when exporting our production which effected the speed duration of particular clips; this issue was explained to our audience before presenting our footage so they took this into consideration when assessing our work. The date for our first cut to be completed by was delayed due to exams. At this stage we are behind schedule as we originally predicted this day as our final completion date. We don't see this as an issue as we are able to finish filming within the next week and will continue to edit in lesson and leisure time.