Rough cut evaluation

In order to see if our rough cut made sense and if we could do anything to improve it, we asked a couple of people to watch it and evaluate it.

Strengths
Something our audience complimented was our story plot, they said they understood what was going on. This was a very nice point to hear as we were worried about people not understanding what was going on! Another thing that people picked up on was the transition between the story and the performance, and they enjoyed how they slowly faded into each other, making the party scene even more effective. Again this was very nice to hear. Thirdly, people picked up on the editing in the party scene, they complimented the way that peoples/DJ's actions matched the movement and sound of the song.

Weaknesses
On the other hand there are a few things we could potentially work on. Firstly people picked up on the editing in the first sequence and that it doesn't completely match the music, making it look a bit jumpy. This is not a huge problem as we can work to change it! And we are till yet to fill in a few gaps, therefore the audience questioned that!

Overall

Overall we were very happy by peoples reactions of the video and are glad that it makes sense. However we will work within the next week to fill up the gaps and to make it run smoothly.

Rough Cut

Recently we have been editing our footage we took over the couple days of our shoot, some things have been going really well, however it is becoming increasingly difficult as we have not shot all of our footage yet.

We started by going through all our shots and sorting them out into different bins, one for the performance and one for the narrative. Along the way we watched all the shots and took out all of the ones that were mistakes and looked poor.

We then started to cut the performance scene, we wanted it to build up really nicely as the song was building so we used longer tracking shots. We also wanted to keep it a mystery so the audience would ask questions, so we cut together a number of fast shots. When the track dropped we started to use fast past editing in order to give the sequence energy. One thing that I think we did well in this sequence was editing in time to the music, we used the drum pattern in order to form a basis for the way we edited. There is also a section where a new wobbly snyth comes in and we cut the video perfectly I time. However I would like to make the scene eve more energetic and crazy by introducing more crowd shots, with fast past editing.

The narrative so far is also looking very good, we are using establishing shots cut together with close ups of the kids to get a feel of where we are. Again, we successfully used the music as a basis to cut the shots together. This time we used slower paced editing to create tension and allow the story line to be successfully told. We are still yet to put in an image of the woods in on the green screen, which we will do after we have finished the rough cut.

A hard part of this sequence was editing as the music started to build up. We decided that the running scene (we have not shot) is too long, therefore we cut the opening scene longer. In order to be in time with the music, we had to cut a number of shots of the fox walking into the office quickly. This part was really difficult as it took a lot of time and effort, however in the end it looked great. The shots of Jason were great and we were able to get some humorous reaction shots of him looking scared, his award winning performance made cutting a lot easier!

Overall we are nearly finished with our rough cut and very happy with it so far. There are a few issues with continuity and time however we will be able to sort them out.

Website Evaluations

So far I am very happy with the look of our website. Our group member, Bee, is a very talented designer therefore she designed this very artistic shape to use as the background of the website, which works perfectly and suits the character of our artists. Also there are clear sub-titles about where to go e.g.. Art gallery, which easily links in to another area of the website which is filled with lots of content, for example the gallery has a number of pictures from the artists, making the website more visual. The use of hyperlinks to videos, music etc... is very effective as we are not shown a link, instead we are shown a thumbnail of the video that helps it to blend in with the rest of the website. We also have sections of the website where you can submit comments and contact the artists, allowing audience participation which is another strength about our website.
Overall, I don't think that there are many problems with our website, however I think we could update the content more and link in social media stories from twitter etc... to make the website updated.

Shooting Schedule

Trouble in the West – Shooting Schedule

 

Tuesday – Filming in the studio

 

8:50 - Unpacking and setting up the necessary equipment

 

10:00 – Shooting scenes: 17,18,19,20,21 (Location I)

 

11:30 – Looking for extras

 

11:50- 13:00 Shooting scenes: 14,15,16 (Location I)

 

13:00 -14:00 Lunch break

 

14:00 – Setting up location II, unpacking props

 

15:00-16:30 Shooting scenes: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 (Location II)

 

16:30-17:00 Setting up the table and unpacking the food (Location III)

 

17:00-18:00 Shooting scenes: 22,23,24 (Location III)

 

18:00 Pack up the equipment

 

 

Wednesday- Filming the Office scenes (Cornhill)

 

15:00 – Unpacking and setting up the equipment

 

15:30 – Shooting scenes: 8,9,10,11 (Location IV)

 

17:00 - Pack up the equipment

 

 

 

Thursday – Pick up shots (Guildford)

 

16:00- Setting up the equipment

 

16:30-18:00 Shooting scenes: 12,13,14 (Location V)

 

18:00 Pack up the equipment and leave

 

 

 

 

Evaluation of shoot day

In order to prepare for our shoot day we had to be fully organised, therefore the day before we had to do a number of things: Prepare our set (Painting fake walls), collecting leaves, making sure our cast were fully prepared and with all the props we needed. This meant when we arrived on the shoot, we had pretty much everything set up and ready to go. All we had to do was to put all the props in place, eg. The DJ set. However the set still looked a bit bland and boring, it didn't look like a rave. So to change this we added in some colourful lighting and some leaves on the floor to give it a more lively/ forest feel. One thing we did well was dividing the roles on the day, I was in charge of directing the actors and what they should be doing, whilst Elizabeth focused on getting the right shots and Bea made sure the set was looking good and gave some helpful suggestions. Personally I thought I did very well at directing all the actors so that we could get the exact shots we wanted, and making sure everyone did the best they could. One problem we had on the shoot day was the lack of people in crowd, to resolve this we made the shots very close to the DJ's to give off the effect of it being more packed. Also we ran out of time very quickly, therefore we had to arrange another date to finish the footage we needed. I think the most successful part of the shoot was at the end where we worked very well together and kept on trying to get a shot which in the end turned out to be a very amazing shot! I wish that the house scene would look more realistic with other props such as a TV, even though it still looked very effective. Overall I think that we worked very well as a team as we all knew what we wanted, therefore it was easy to work together. I don't think we will need to make huge changes to our Artwork/EP design as we wanted these designs to be very simple and artistic, rather than from photographs. However we did take a few pictures of the fox DJ's as a potential use of a CD cover.