Thursday 23 April 2009

Final Grading/Freedback



After a days session looking through our own and eachothers thriller openings we recieved or grades and additional feedback in which will help to make up our evaluation.

My thriller opening was awarded a grade B-, which personally I was very dissapointed with, after having spent alot of time and effort it was disheartening to have recieved the lowest grade in the class, nevertheless a good grade and with it useful feedback which I will take into deep consideration in order to achieve higher in future pieces of work.

Our teacher expressed that the numerous pieces of music which we included into our opening was the main thing in which let us down, for such a short piece of work too much music detracted from the action on screen and made the piece feel bitty thus lacking flow. Additionally location choice (woods) acted too cliche and thus lost the audiences attention.

Our peers believed that our costume choice could have been considered better, they felt it confusing that a young girl would wear such clothing and lipstick, which pointed out that our intended portrayal, which was that of a disturbed, abused "emo" girl was unsuccessful. additionally they also felt from what was seen of the narrative it appeared fairly complex thus leaving them with a feeling of intrigue.
In comparison to other groups work it is evident that ours lacks in certain aspects, editing of sound being a main one, but overall I was generally pleased with the outcome of our piece, we were congratulated on the engagement we included with characters which other groups tended not to include.














Friday 3 April 2009

Thriller opening final and personal evaluation



Personal Evaluation:

On a whole I am generally pleased with the outcome of our thriller opening. It is evident that during the production we took into considersation key assesment objectives in order to produce an effective thriller opening where all significant conventions within thrillers are considered.


- Where appropriate each shot used has been held steady, aiding to a professional look and helping to hold the audiences attention. However I believe the first shot could perhaps have been slightly more steady as it did prove difficult when filming to zoom and keep the camera steady.

- Framing of shots are consistent whereby the main character (maizie) is always central. Good use of two-shot is evident helping to establish the characters relationship between one another through distance.

- I am most pleased with the use of distance within the opening, varied close ups, long shots, mid shots etc are apparent and really aid to portraying the characters emotions.

-Baring mind the opening had to be within the genre thriller after throrough research into the thriller genre and having found out more about psycological thrillers our group felt this would be an effective sub-genre to work with, our material shot works well within this genre as location choices hold an eriee feel and the narrative shown is quite unsettleing in parts.

- Mise-en-scene again I believe is effective, character and costume choice fits in with the sub-genre nicely, obviously due to lack of spenditure available surrounding objects could have been more suited but where possible we have tried to selectively choose props in order to create meaning within the shot.

- Editing, as discovered one of the hardest stages during production and it certainly took a lot of perfectioning. However after numerous amounts of feedback we finally managed to perfect the editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer, shot lengths have been considered carefully although one shot where the door handle is framed I believe is held too long before we actually see the characters hand open the door.

- Transitions proved effective in giving the opening a professional look and helping to portray different times within the narrative, generally they have been used well although I think there is one shot where a transition is necessary (shot between maizie running into the woods and then curiously looking around the woods.)

- Sound matches on screen action nicely and really emphasises different moods and feelings within the openings. It proved hard to find perfect sound due to a lack available because of restrictions on having to use copyright free music. As a group we overcame this problem and i believe our sound works well within the sub-genre of our thriller.

- Due to our groups lack of skills using programs such as premier I believe our titles lacked sophistication and were very simple, however we did our best and created simple titles which when having looked at other thriller films the type of font and colours we used seemed apparent within a lot of other openings. Transitions used between the titles work well and the length in which they have been held have been considered in order to create intrigue within the audience.
They have been placed centrally and all in the correct order in which should be found.