We have completed the first draft of our film opening and received feedback on it. Overall the opening was very well received, especially our sound editing and use of filters.
After my own inspection of the piece, I found a few other minor issues, namely, the sound clipping at the end. The woman's voiceover is too loud, causing some distortion. This can be fixed in final cut very easily, so it is a change I will definitely make. It will, however, require balancing the music and sound effects as well. The distortion can be found around 2:00 minutes, on the lines "I'd just knock him out, and move in to the next one."
Secondly, the continuity error of the ransom message. The man states that they will meet at "midnight tonight" but when the detective is shown in the alleyway, it is very obviously broad daylight. We attempted to edit the footage to make it appear more like night time, but this negatively affected the quality of the video in other aspects, so we decided to leave it. Thankfully, it did not seem to be a major issue, as in the class feedback, no one mentioned it. Fixing this would require us either reshooting the alley scene or re-recording the voice over. It also seems unusual to have a kidnapper meet the detective in bright daylight, but this is too impractical to fix at this stage in the production.
We received some criticism concerning our mise-en-scene and time period. Supposedly, the costume and tape recorder were not from the same time period, however this is not something we can fix as we do not have more appropriate props available to us, and it would require reshooting, which we cannot do this late in production.
During a peer assessment of our film opening, we received an assortment comments, however the general feedback was very similar but I looked through to identify the improvements we could make.
This group stood out for me as they brought forward the most concern and points of improvements. Though we can't go back and re-film or replace the cassette for them, we can amend the sound gap in final cut pro. This particular issue can be fixed by going back and looking through sound clips and seeing where this gap is, next the gap could be filled with the appropriate non-diegetic music.Though we must be mindful of that fact that altering the sound may diminish the dramatic effect of the loud 'boom' sound at the end, however this is a valid improvement that should be considered if the silence seemed out of place.
The improvements from this group were more doable than the ones from the last group, as I could adjust the exposure of light in the frame during this scene. Though many some groups had found it easier to tell that it was money in the scene than others.
·During the planning process we looked at
previous AS Media preliminary tasks for inspiration, and as a group we liked the spy
theme and decided to adapt it.
·With limited time, and having several ideas for
a storyline we came up with the idea of having a transaction of goods and money
commonly seen in the spy genre. The transaction would involve a fraud and a
victim.
·We decided that the props would need to be
something that we could easily get hold of. Therefore, we came up with the idea
of having a teddy bear, after seeing one being used in a previous AS media preliminary task, and a bag stuffed with a blazer to act as the goods.
Storyboard
Having many different ideas it took us a while to come up
with a final idea and we decided other minor details could be decided on the
day of filming. Our story board (as seen above) would be used to make sure we
knew what we had to do the next day when we started filming. The story board
had to be clear, concise and we also added the details of the shots we wanted
in each scene. Mindi decided that she would bring in her bear and Xena would
bring in her camera.
We came up with the name ‘Taken’ by looking at our
storyline, a bear being taken, and making it short so that it would not give away too many
details of what the video would be about.
Filming
1. On the day we decided that Xena and Mindi would be the
actors and also help to decide where the camera would be set up for each shot.
Whilst Zayanah and I filmed each shot and set up the camera.
Using the storyboard we were able to set the scene quickly
due to only having a limited time for filming. We originally wanted to start
with an establishing shot as drawn on the storyboard however we thought that an
over the shoulder shot would be more practical due to the different heights of
the tables and chairs. Therefore, we used shot reverse shot. These shots were
all within the 180 degree rule. We added in some extra camera angles and speech to make sure the storyline was clear.
2. This shot shows Mindi walking across the corridor. We
originally wanted to do a long shot however due to the corridor not being wide
enough we were unable to do this so used a middle shot instead. We shot the
midshot from the front and behind to give two perspectives.
3. Using several shot-reverse-shots made the scene more
dramatic as the realisation of getting a fake bear sinks in. The extreme close
up of the bear allows the audience to distinguish between the fake and real
bear (different ribbons) later on in the video.
As we liked the tilt used before at the beginning of the
video we decided to add in another tilt as Mindi drops the fake bear on the
floor and runs off. In addition to this we tried to add in a tracking shot of
Mindi running to trial what it would look like if we decided to add it into our
final project. We found that it was effective however did not look professional
as the camera shook a bit too much.
4. In this scene we used match on action as Mindi opened the
door. However, we had some continuity errors as in one shot someone’s head can
be seen through the door window. We could have filmed some additional shots of
Mindi opening the door as the match on action was not entirely smooth in our
final video. We did not include the over the shoulder shot as we thought it
would be more dramatic to just show Mindi slamming the door open.
5. Having not used over-the-shoulder shot yet we decided to add
it in here to show Mindi and Xena having a conversation. We had some issues
with the focus as the camera focused on Mindi’s shoulder instead of Xena. If we
could repeat it next time we would make sure it was in focus before we filmed.
6. Using a long shot meant we could see the bear falling out of
the window. We initially wanted to film the bear falling directly towards the
camera but there were bushes beneath the window making it hard to set up the
camera there.
Editing
We used Final Cut
Pro to edit our final video. None of our group had used this programme before
but we were able to get the hang of it and managed to edit the video to how we
wanted it. We added music and titles to improve our final piece. We had to cut
a few clips to make sure we didn't linger on any bits for too long whilst
cutting out any unwanted parts. The end of the video fades to black to show
that the bear died after falling from the window. The editing timeline is shown
below.
If we could do this again I would have liked to have tried adding different filters or voiceovers.
