Evaluation

Lauren Anthony - Evaluation

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Final Film

After a lot of hard work and editing, here is our final film:

All in all, the film eventually worked out how we had hoped, however, it would have been improved if we had had more filming time, but because we had to prioritise the editing we had to ensure that the music etc was perfect before going out filming again, and we didn't have time to do so in the end. However, I think the film does successfully create tension and suspense, which was the aim.

Room For Improvement And The Overall Experience

• We decided that there were a few aspects of our film that if we had the time, we would have added to. Although we were both happy with our film, there was a shot that we wanted to have at the end of the film, of Amy smiling and looking directly into the camera, but due to lack of time we couldn't do this, and we eventually decided that it was good without it. Also, we really wanted to find out a way to have Amy's body in the background, with her face in the foreground, but it would have taken to long to figure out.

• Over and above this, we were both very happy with the way our film had turned out, and the experience was so useful as it really prepared us for our A2 assessments. It made us learn so much about the media industry, camera angles and the editing process, so we are very prepared for next year and for other situations in the future.

• If Matt and I were to do this again, I think we would definitely manage our time better, as it was quite stressful at the last minute. However, as an overall experience, it was very enjoyable and we are both really looking forward to our task for next year.

Editing Our Final Footage

When it came to editing our final film, we found it quite a lengthy process. It took a long time to perfect the footage as a lot of the time the shots didn't look right when put together. After we perfected this, it was simply a case of making sure that the music fitted in the with the finished film. This was an issue, but once finished, we found that the film was working well.

The first section was easy to edit; the only issue we had was perfecting the shots so that they flowed, as as she was walking, it was important to make it look like she was walking to and from the right place. Regarding the second half, we had to make sure that there was no evidence that the film lacked continuity, and had to ensure that the same thing applied there. We had a very minor issue in that the credits took a long time to perfect, but other than that, we had no problems.

On the last day of our editing process, we had an enourmous catastrophe; our film had disappeared from iMovie and we couldn't find it anywhere. After searching through the Macbook multiple times, I eventually fixed it, much to our relief. I dragged the film back into the space that it had disappeared from, and it reappeared in iMovie. This taught Matt and myself the importance of backing up your work, as this could've been a big issue if we had not been able to fix our problem.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/new-features.html

Naming Process For Our Thriller

• Matt and I really struggled to choose a name for our thriller as we disagreed on what was appropriate on occasion. I initially thought of names such as Dysphoria, but Matt and I agreed that it didn't fit in with the thriller genre enough so we had to re-think our ideas quite a lot.

• Eventually we decided on Hysteria as we agreed that because it is only a short clip of the film, the audience wouldn't instantly be aware of Amy's mindset and we wanted to display her schizophrenia through the name of the film.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria
  

Marketing

The marketing side of media is very important when you're creating a film. I wanted to consider how the film would ve advertised if it were to be produced into a real media product, ready to be sold on the shelves. It is imperitive to ensure that the right people are advertising you, so I thought it would be best to have support from the following companies:

Dreamworks:

Channel 4/Film4:

Universal:

Music and Dialogue

Music is very important in a thriller, and in ours we felt that it was vital for it to be perfect. We struggled a lot with getting it exactly right as for some reason, GarageBand wouldn't save the file in the way that we needed, and we ended up re-doing the music on many occasions, which was a cause of concern as we didn't want to risk not finishing our film on time. However, once we had mastered how to fix the problem, we decided on two specific Apple loops to use, which made our issues much lighter as they were not downloaded from the Internet so there was no risk of copyright infringement or not being able to access the sound on other computers (only on Macs, or only on PC for example.)

After the majority of the editing was coming to an end, Matt and I were beginning to become concerned that the music wasn't going to work properly. We really felt that music, although minimal, was very important as we wanted to build tension in more ways than one. Eventually we managed to fix the music issue, and we put an eerie high pitched sound, mixed with an acoustic piano loop over the middle section of our film. We had three attempts, as with the first two, the high pitched sound had way too high a frequency and was painful to listen to, therefore we had to ensure that the sound on that area of GarageBand was turned down. After this, we ended up with the perfect music.

Following our music creation, we had to consider dialogue. As Amy wouldn't be working with a script, we had to rely on her more, which was fine as she has prior acting experience. As we filmed her, we wanted her to express pain in her voice and facial expression, which she did perfectly, enabling our editing process to be easier.