Audience feedback and Self evaluation (draft 1)

Self evaluation of draft 1

The version of 'The Pursuant' in which can be found on my blog, is very much the first draft. From this first production of the film, I am now able to see where are strengths lay as a group and where there is room for improvement.

A major flaw of the film in which is due for improvement, is the transition designs. I feel that the non-diegetic music and mise en scene complements and establishes the tone of our opening, however the transitions in which are used to progress the film from shot to shot, negate this unsettling atmosphere and create almost comedic and 'slideshow' infliction on our film. As well as this, another area in which was in need of development was our lack of shot variation. Our initial plan for our film insisted in having extremely tight shots and fast paced editing in order to create a sense of disjointedness for the audience. However this was not achieved in our first draft, our production contained little diversity in shot variation, something which is going to loose us a substantial amount of marks in our final production. Therefore, we are keen to include a lot more footage to further our ability. 

Once we add titles and our borrowed footage of the institution, the cinematography of our film will immediately look more professional.

In contrast to the negatives, I think that my group and I's hard work in preparing the props and the mise en scene has paid off and this is palpable in our first draft. 

Audience feedback

I found the feedback session with my target audience beneficial as I was able to get a clear understanding of what they liked and didn't like. In order to find out these views, i asked a variety of questions. As this is our first draft of our edited footage, the titles are yet to be included, therefore the first question I asked was 'where do you think the titles would be most appropriate?'. After discussion and a variety of different opinions, the majority of the audience thought that if the titles were over the top, this would take the importance away from the mise en scene and consequently the titles should appear separately on a background in order to give the titles and what is going on on screen equal appreciation. 

The second question asked was 'what are your opinions on the transitions?' Immediately the constructive criticism rose to surface and all of the group shared their dislike for the transitions!! (Which is understandable as after reviewing the film myself, i am aware that they do not meet the conventions of a horror film). Therefore this is something i will immediately change as soon as I get back in the editing suite. 

Evaluation of preliminary task

After reviewing my preliminary task, the strengths and weaknesses have become clear. One of the weaknesses of the task was that I feel that my group and I would have benefited from changing the story line, as due to the vague plot, we experienced struggles in what to include in the filming process. Looking back now, we should have included more detail in our story board to enable us to follow the structure. Due to the fact that my group and I had different available free periods in which we could film, we struggled to find a time apart from in lesson when we could all film together. Furthermore, next time I will produce a more detailed production schedule before hand, then we will incur no troubles in finding time we can all film. However, as a AS media studies student, these weaknesses are expected as I have never took part in a task involving filming before.

Although I am aware of the flaws in our preliminary task. I am also very much aware of the strengths in which we achieved as a group. I think that the success of the film was the variety of shots we used including shot reverse shot and continuity in our filming. However we need to add a match on action shot in order to achieve the best of our ability. When editing our film using Adobe Premier Elements, we decided to put a filter over the our footage in order to add to the atmosphere being portrayed the short clip. I feel that this worked well with the footage (the girl standing in the road) and created a successful effect.

I am going to take on board all of the weakness and be careful not to incur these flaws into my main task as I don't think my full potential was achieved in the preliminary task. Similarly, I will make sure that I will illustrate my strengths when filming and editing my opening scene.

Production Log: No longer a producer :(

Hi!
Today we finished filming :( apart from the few mishaps in which we incurred on our production journey it was a really fun experience being a producer! I enjoyed working within a team to produce something that we are all immensely proud of. I am going to miss working closely with my team however I am looking forward to telling you all about my skills in my evaluation.


Emma x