Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Final Evaluation for 'A Night To Remember'


I am quite satisfied with the final result of my film as it followed the Film Noir style that we are supposed to be following and made the time limit, which was something that I struggled to reach due to the lack of footage that I had available to use. The editing took more time than I originally expected, due to my only previous editing experience being on iMovie, which barely took any time at all.
If I could re create the movie, I would tweak quite a few things. There were many repeats of the same shots in my film due to my group and I not taking enough footage to begin with and then never getting around to shoot new scenes and reshoot the old ones. There are many shots in the film that I am not overly fond of due to their how they have captured the things in the scene. Things such as the rule of thirds could have been used better, to make some of the shots less awkward. If I could re do the music, I would need more loops as the ones that are available either don’t fit the genre of the film, so if they were used, the film might gain a comedic feel, and that would pull the film away from the Film Noir style that we are supposed to be creating. There are also awkward parts of the dialogue that are too low, so I would re record them so I could increase the volume of the backing track.
My film didn’t end up very much like how I originally envisioned it… Or how I imagined it the next time… Or the time after that… But that’s beside the point; it still ended up pretty well. When I first completed editing the film, it didn’t really make sense to me, but that may have been an effect of staring at a screen for a few hours… After watching anime… But when I watched it again the next day, it made a little sense, but the main problem for me was that I knew what was happening and how it was happening, but I was trying to watch it from someone who has no idea of what it is about before watching it’s point of view. Doing this put me off quite a lot as I was worrying that no one would understand what was happening and think that the film was too jumpy as the film consists of mainly flashbacks. I got a few other people to watch the film and found out that it made sense to them and I was just over thinking things. When I was creating the soundtrack for the film, I was unable to find a the type of loops that I was after for the interview scenes, but I ended up getting some inspiration from the Sherlock soundtrack as it has the same style as what I was trying to create, and it didn't cause the soundtrack to be awkward.
The film conveys the chosen genre well as there is a little bit of suspense and the editing has made it look like it is of the right genre, but I feel as if there are things missing from it, as if it barely follows the track of the set genre. I don’t really know how to explain it, but something just doesn’t seem right about the films genre.
I didn’t have all the necessary shots to complete my film, which is why many shots got repeated, slowed down and chopped up. Reshooting scenes and shooting new ones would have made the editing process a lot easier, and would have allowed the film to be closer to the five minute mark, which would have allowed me to bring some more sense into the film.
My group worked quite effectively, but there was a lot of unorganisation during the planning, production and post-production process, but other than that, we worked together quite well.
I believe that I used Final Cut Pro quite effectively as I has all of the footage split into bins that had the footage from scenes their scenes. I also has a sequence per scene, so that nothing overlapped, and there wasn’t too much going on for Final Cut to sort out. When I completed editing all of the shots and scenes, I created a new project and copied all of the footage across to it. This prevented the problem of Final Cut becoming too slow while I was trying to add the final touches to the project and helped because the project that I has that contained all of the sequences for the scenes was becoming too slow to work with.
The other technical problems that I faced were quite simple and easy to fix. At first there was a few files that hadn't been converted to AIC format, so we had to go back and re convert them. Then we found out that we didn't have certain shots that we needed for our movies, so we had to go back and find the all and convert them as well. There was a point that I forgot that I was supposed to keep the shots in my USB in one place as Final Cut hyperlinks to the file locations, so I moved a few of them to a different folder and all of the moved footage went offline, which was quite easy to fix. The next problem that I faced was when I was trying to copy the scenes across to the project that I would bring the entire movie together in I found out that something had changed the format of the sequence for scene two from AIC to DVC, so the size of sequences frame was smaller than the rest of the movie. I tried changing it but was unable to, and due to it being the weekend at the time, I was unable to ask Mr Andrews for help, so I decided to just redo the scene which was a pain. The problems that I had through the project were just simple mistakes that were easy to fix.
During the editing process I honestly didn't use our original storyboards or shot lists, as they were nothing like how I wanted the film to end up, and also wouldn't end up getting close to the set time limit. I only used the rough edit as a general guide for how the interview's conversation was supposed to flow.
The EDL and sound design templates weren't much help to me as I only had a general idea of what I was doing with my film and constantly changed the order of things, so I kind of just went with the flow but ended up happy with the result.
When it came to time management... Well, lets just say that it wasn't my groups strong point. Last term we worked quite well and were ready in time when it came to filming, but were still doing last minute editing on the day that the rough edit was due. Then this term I was away for the first two weeks, and thought that they would have been able to go off by themselves and do extra filming for the scenes that were set at Bella's house, but when I came back they hadn't done anything. Then the next weekend that we could have done shooting, Bella was moving and the rest of us already had plans for the weekend that we couldn't cancel on. So this project we were left with barely enough footage to make a decent film.
This term I haven't been posting much about the editing process on my blog... I think the only post about this terms work is my EDL... I know I should have been posting regularly but I didn't, and I have no excuse for it. There isn't much evidence to support my work which will probably bring my marks down, but it's too late to fix that.
Anyway, overall I think that the editing of my film was a success, although there were a few problems that I had to deal with, it ended up being quite good.

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