We showed the rough cut of our work to our teacher and class mates, they gave us feedback on what they liked about our opening sequence, and more importantly, what could be improved. The constructive criticism gave us ideas on how to change and improve different elements of our opening sequence.
Mise en scène
The main comment for mise en scène was that the location gave our opening sequence a lot of dark and badly lighted shots. Reasons for this were because we chose a nearby woods as our location, and on the days we filmed, the weather was overcast and wet. This left us with some good, but badly lighted shots, as we were working in the outdoor, we had to rely on natural lighting as we were limited to what lighting we could use. We decided to amend this by cherry picking the clips with better lighting, and scraping the clips that were making our opening sequence look unlighted and unprofessional.
Camerawork
We were told our camera movements were sometimes jolty and fast, and although this was what we were aiming for, we did soon see that this made the video look unprofessional, and badly filmed. Another problem was that many of the shots were not steadily filmed and we really saw this after our class’ reaction to this. After hearing the feedback for this aspect of our opening sequence, it was clear that this was our biggest letdown. This influenced us to return to our location, and film more steady, less jolty, and generally better clips. This also gave us a chance to use the new ideas we had thought up since originally filming our opening sequence, and collect more shots to work with for our final production.
Editing
We were recommended to make our opening credits more clear, and also suggested by class members, that we should change the positions and times of our current opening credits, to some more convenient and ideal places in the opening sequence. For example, to have names pop up in more appropriate places, or for names to slide across the screen with the movement of a person, or to coincide with the camera shot. We were also told to add some transitions, and although we felt adding transitions would make the opening sequence look tacky and unprofessional, we took our new advice, and added some to our opening sequence, and were pleased with this decision, as it fitted in with the genre we chose to base our film around well.
Sound
By the feedback from our class and teacher on this aspect of the opening sequence, I think they were generally impressed by our choice of sound. The only point that was made about the sound was that because it was especially windy on the day of filming also due to our lack of filming equipment, the uploaded film on the computer played an annoying whistling sound. Obviously, we do not hear this in professional films, therefore it was vital to amend this problem, as we felt this was a potential downfall to our piece. This lead us to a big decision to use music instead of dialogue in a lot of the shots, we did this by cutting down on the amount of dialogue, and even cutting out the shots that were badly affected by wind.
Generic conventions
As our rough cut made our class and teacher laugh from even early on in the opening sequence, we felt that we had met the generic conventions of our chosen genre. The genre we chose for our opening sequence was a family comedy, and after the positive feedback from how it had made people laugh, we felt we had accomplished this aim.
- Freddie Meade
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