Rough Cut
The creation of a rough cut is an important stage of developing and finalising our opening thriller sequence. Through this it allows our group to develop a variety of constructive criticism from a range of sources. Despite the unfinished quality of the clip we have created thus far, this rough cut will still greatly resemble our final piece, so the viewers can still provide their opinions and help us to grasp what improvements need to be made, whilst we have not yet finalised our thriller opening. Without proceeding to do a rough cut , myself and my group would not receive the crucial criticism needed to reach our full potential, meaning we would not be able to present a high quality of work, through our thriller sequence.
Audience feedback is extremely important to consider as it provides a variety of new perspective views myself and fellow group members would not of spotted, most likely due to our extensive exposure to our clip. This feedback will help define our main strength and weaknesses, allowing us to devote our time sufficiently upon the key areas of weakness.
In order to collect our audience feedback we used two types methods, this allowed us to gather a variety of response from a range of ages. The two methods we used were, peer assessment within our media class, as well as asking family and friends to review our rough cut clip, published to youtube, and post an evaluative response in the comments.
Firstly, our group proceeded to present our rough cut to our peers within our class. We collected a variety of responses from individuals, introducing us to few new perspectives of our clip and more importantly how we can improve our sequence. When showing the rough cut clip to the class of student this was our groups first time we had watched it in its entirety so whilst watching I noticed a few weaknesses immediately, elements we would have noticed easily if we had watched it in full, before we had uploaded to youtube, i.e background commentary from members of our group during filming we had overlooked and not deleted. Once the audience of students had provided us with their insight into our sequence, our teacher presented her personal opinion of our thriller opening and summarised our strengths and weaknesses, making it clear what we had exceeded in and what we needed to improved next. Some of her opinions, in regards to our strengths included the high quality of acting and its ability to sustain a conventional low key lighting. The weaknesses of ours in her opinion are the lack of attention to detail (i.e unintentional background noise) and transitions between frames. Another benefit of this style of peer assessment for me was not only hearing a plethora of comments and suggestions, but also for me the analysis of other class members work allowed me to view a different narrative from mine, but still gather ideas that can be applied to my thriller opening that would help to improve it.
Secondly, we then asked is friends and family would view our thriller opening and provide us with constructive feedback. We then received three responses in the form of youtube comments;
Summary-
Strengths
Through both peer assessing and the comments posted to our published rough cut clip I have gathered that generally the main strengths of our opening thriller clip were the following;
- Prevalent use of well presented low key lighting- a nighttime theme is captured throughout our clip and is therefore predominantly dark. This constant ill lighting emphasises the eerie atmosphere we aimed to achieve, a quality highly conventional of the thriller genre.
- excellent use of music accentuates the sustained tension and ambiguity- the specifically commended section of our sequence was the beginning. This was due to our good use of eerie parallel and contrasting sounds and music. For example, the sounds of children laughing were paired with tension building, cinematic music A juxtaposition of sounds that our audience agreed were presented with excellent conviction, especially in regards to the scene of the child on the swing it is played behind.
- Well conveyed variety of camera shots- our audience concluded that our use of varied camera angles, whether that be high angles, low angles or handheld shots. Our feedback informed our group that the compilation of diverse camera angles created an interesting clip for the viewer, as their eyes are averted to numerous elements of the action, with distant shots providing a sense of location and close up shots creating an uncomfortable invasion of the viewers personal space.
- Great acting- many of our audience commented upon the high standard of acting we captured. A high standard of acting is crucial in order to easily convey a believable narrative, capturing an audience.
Weaknesses
- Unintentional background dialogue- Within the our clip, whilst the protagonist is captured running away from the antagonist, featured background dialogue was noticed by our audience. Because we had not yet watched our clip in entirety we had not spotted this error before we had published the clip on youtube.
- The opening of the antagonist's eyes as he awakes from his flashback was not clear enough- the opening of the antagonist's eyes was intended to create a great impact, paired with a loud sound effect. However due to our actors fair colouring and the low key lighting our audience have agreed that the impact was not as effective as it could of been. Also the clip itself was a little delayed when paired with the sound effect, in turn meaning a vast sense of tension was not created.
- Too many effects used on the credits- one of the comments posted onto our video and mentioned during our peer assessing was that our credits to complex in the sense that a vast quantity of effects were used over the original text. This not only made it hard for the audience to read the credits, but the fleeting, scatty nature of the text was very distracting, whilst the viewer was trying to analyse the action on screen.
In conclusion, myself and my group have found the process of creating a rough cut of our opening thriller clip and presenting it to an audience, extremely helpful. This is because we have gathered a variety of helpful feed back that we can then use to improve the quality of our clip. The next steps to improving our thriller film are as follows; firstly, we must delete the background noise of people conversing whilst we were filming. This is very easily done by muting all sound within the clip and simply playing dramatic, cinematic music over the top of the clip using the program of final cut xpro. The music paired with these particular frames must create a vastly suspenseful atmosphere, as the victim is chased by the antagonist and the audience is made to feel sympathetic for the character. The next weakness of ours is the waking up of the antagonist, specifically as his eyes open. To improve this were have talked about me applying a light coat of mascara on his eye lashes to make his eyes bolder. Finally, we have also discussed the over use of effects used for the credits and have agreed to limit these. In particular we have made sure there is no credit used whilst we have the 'street cam' filter over our frames at the bus stop. As well as this, we have made sure that we have reduced the amount the credits shake; the shaking effect on the credits makes the text very unclear and distracting, therefore we have only used this particular effect for one or two names, creating a variation but not over using it.
At our next group meeting we shall raise these issues brought to our attention by our feedback from an audience and discuss a way to improve these weaknesses in way we can all agree is most effective. We have already briefly discussed the constructive criticism we had receive and are extremely happy to receive a variety of fresh view points that we had not originally seen, thus helping us easily improve our over all thriller clip and subsequent grade attached to this.
'Humanity Off- Rough Cut'
