Problems in the project and feedback from members of our media class

What problems did we have when creating the media product?
The largest problem we had when creating our thriller was time, and how we should use it. Our original piece was over three and a half minutes, and so we needed to cut it down to the two minute limit. We realised this very early on, and so decided to cancel filming the first part of the opening, as it was deemed unnecessary, and would have no purpose besides making the opening longer. We eventually decided it would be best to cut down a lot of the speech and the reaction shots, which took about 40 seconds off the film. We also we forced to cut down on nearly every shot, in order to make them flowing and to shorten the film. This was hard to achieve as we had to time each shot change to the beat of the music, and still find room to place the credits. The shot we cut the most was the staircase shot, where we get a birds eye view of Tanwyn while the voiceover plays. We originally had the entire sequence from him at the bottom to top, but cut it because we thought it was boring, and because it took up too much time. The biggest problem I had with the finished piece has already been mentioned in shot evaluation, and is the black bar which obscures a lot of the side on shot of the two characters as they first meet.

With the members of our group agreeing that we could find nothing else to improve, we asked members of our media class to fill out a sheet with the following questions, and mark each point with a score out of 10. We had decided beforehand that if the average score for a point was under 8, that we spend some more time to improve the part with the low mark. Our target is so high because it has been said that all the power in the film industry is held by the audience. If the audience likes our film, then it can normally be called a success.

Average out of 10 & some comments left by the interviewee

Holding a shot steady: 9.5 + Steady throughout

Framing shots and choosing what to include and what to leave out: 9.2 + Good angles & left out irrelevant stuff

Using a variety of shot distances: 9.7 + Plenty of varied shots

Shooting material that is appropriate to the opening of a thriller film (was there evidence of thriller signifiers?): 9.1 + Stairs and narrow corridor + lots of thriller signifiers

Selecting mise en scene to create particular effects: 9.2 + Black and White worked

Editing so that meaning is clear to the viewer (was there a readable narrative?): 9.3 + Easy to follow & creates mystery

Using varied shot transitions and other effects appropriately: 8.2 + Music fitted the mood

Using sound with images and editing sound effectively: 8.2 -Sometimes hard to hear voice-over and speech +Music fitted the mood

Using titles effectively: 8.5 - Credits could have been up for longer

Any other points? (Representational issues? Effectiveness of characters? Did the opening hook you?): 9.0 -The swearing wasn't very classy "Dickhead"

We were very pleased with these results as we had no parts which had an average score of under 8. Because this meant we did not have to improve any parts of the film, and we still had a lot of time left due to finishing very early, we decided to put some more work into two out of three points that had a score of 8 to 9 . They are as follows.

Using sound with images and editing sound effectively: 8.2 -Sometimes hard to hear voice-over and speech +Music fitted the mood

Using titles effectively: 8.5 - Credits could have been up for longer

Both of these points were very easy to edit using the editing software, only requiring us to raise the volume bar of the speech layer of the software, and increase the amount of time where credits were shown using the time stretch tool. We have gone back and asked the same members of the media class, and they agree that these areas have since been perfected.