Wednesday, 20 January 2010

Promoting is the key !

Having finished filming and editing my film, I had to create to pieces of promotional material for it, a poster and a review.
This meant that I had to research the posters and reviews of other films in the same genre.

Thursday, 7 January 2010

I can here voices . . .

but the mouths aren't moving!
After the first screening I realised that I had to deal once again withthe sound.
I had to correct some of the previous over-dubbing as it was too obvious! To do this I had to watch extremely carefully and i some cases split the dialogue and move it apart.
i'vegottogoandmeetamate would become ... I've got to go and meet -- a mate. to get this right took a lot of of effort and a lot of zooming into the page, so i was viewing what was happening by the millisecond.
Finally i had solved it ... kinda... i now wonder why I didn't shoot in quieter more predictable locations.
I also had to work with some of the musics sound levels. . .slightly.

Wednesday, 6 January 2010

The audience is here ...

so feel the fear.





After working on our films for so long, we had the terrifying prospect of showing our film to an actual audience. This is a very important part of all film making from amateur to professional but it is still really scary.

The first people to watch my film was my classmates and my friends, and they all gave audience feedback.
I found from this audience feedback that people found the film a bit hard to follow and this was mainly due to sound (in several ways). The Liverpudlian accent of the actors, the volume of the music, the volume of background noise (wind) and the quality of the over dubbing. This meant that I had to re edit the film to make it easier to follow, to begin with I took down the levels of the music in some places and also the background noise. I then had to edit the over dubbed sound so that is matched with the actors movements more, I did however, decided that I couldn't change the accents of the actors and that the accent was actually important to the story. I also found that the dialogue was easier to understand now all the other problems had been dealt with.

As that audience feedback was both biased and not from my target audience, I decided to upload my newly edited film onto Vimeo, see the responses here.

vimeo.com/8771384
I felt that both of these people where knowledgeable in the topic of film making. I was quite happy with their comments, but thought that a lot of the changes they suggested were quite high level and would have been quite difficult for me to deal with as I don't have for example specialist skills in sound editing - this would be something I could change if I was working on a professional short film.
I then got further feedback from Will, a director/editor that came into school. He helped me edit my shots so that the film had a better rhythm. He also gave me several ideas to 'try out' and explained that when editing a film you often have to experiment to see if things will work or make sense. He said I should put footage of Liverpool at the beggining of the film, I tried this but when I did it completly broke up the current rhythm of the film and completly changed the tone. I also felt as it was only five minutes long that to introduce the city would take away from the main focus the relationship between the characters.