Our Final Cut

JARLINC's Final Cut of our film 'Shadowed' 

After doing many of the improvements on our rough cut, my group and I have finally completed our film and are ready to put it onto our blogs:

           

Our Rough Cut and Rough Cut Feedback

Our Rough Cut - Shadowed

          

Rough Cut Feedback: target audience aged 15-17 feedback

Positives:

1) Soundtrack has a good effect on the film

2) Storyline is good and clear

3) The scene where the Antagonist steps out from the shadows had a good effect

4) Light switch noise adds a little something to him turning on the light and the shadow not being there anymore.

Improvements to be made:

1) 0.12: nobody behind door, then Alex appears guarding the door from other side in next shot

2) 0.15: Crew in shot

3) 0.20: Crew in shot

4) The actor in the window appears to fade away; this appeared strange

5) Crew in the window distracts attention/ can't really see the person in the window very well

6) Editing is too slow. If Alex has just run away from somebody, we need to have fast passed editing until the point where he locks the door, then he presumably thinks he is safe. At the moment it is too slow and flowing.

7) SFX needed for actor appearing in window to sign post for direction

8) 0.25: Alex looks directly at the camera (almost waiting for direction)

9) 0.42: POV is confusing and not needed

10) Use different box because the 'Location Recording Kit' is clearly visible. 

11) Instead of paper, people normally wrap guns in cloth or towel

12) 0.59: Cut first shot earlier; it takes too long to find the item

13) 1.10: The noise sounds like Alex has fired the gun, maybe make the SFX a crash of glass or something more obvious

14) 1.37: Shot too long, camera passes the coat; maybe cut it out into separate cuts.

15) 1.47: Pan cuts too early; don't see the corridor to see that there isn't anything there

16) Gun SFX needs to be changed to something realistic

17) Titles IDEA = title appears then the shadow slowly fades in behind it. (Link to story line)

18) Continuity Error with Alex's arm

19) Linger on the smirk to create tension

20) The ghost sound sounds like a whale/Jurassic park dinosaur.

Target audience aged 17-25 feedback

 Positives:

5) The film is pretty cool

6) Loved the soundtrack; adds good effect.

Improvements to be made:

21) At the hedge scene in the POV you can't see the Protagonist go into the science block and then in the next scene he is already in the corridor with door shut.

Rough Cut Feedback Analysis

1) We are going to reshoot this scene and film Alex go through the door so you can clearly see how the protagonist goes through.  - HOWEVER if you look closely you can see Alex's arm before the shot cuts to inside the corridor: 

Before

After

2, 3 + 5) We were aware of the reflection problem straight from the start and plan to reshoot the scene with either posters on the door to hide the reflection OR start filming when its lighter outside to lesson the chance of a reflection. Also to minimise the chance of a HUGE reflection should there still be a slight faint one; myself and Dan will not be standing right next to the camera.

Before

After

4) Originally the idea of the Antagonist fading away in the window was to add to the idea that he isn't actually real or there. With the idea in mind that if the film had been carried on it would have been a dream, we decided to make the effects are strange or as unusual as we could as long as they added into the whole idea of the film title "Shadowed'. We are thinking about addressing this but fear it may take off from the effect that the Antagonist isn't a real human and the idea that because you never see the actor enter the building, the fading process makes the audience think he can disappear and 

reappear wherever in the Protagonist's dream.

6) We are planning on doing some more shooting for the beginning of our film where we have just the protagonist's feet in the shot running. This will allow us to cut and trim it to make the editing process quicker than it is currently. We are also planning on completely changing the start of our film to make the film even better.

Before

After

7) We are taking this piece of feedback into consideration and are looking for some sort of SFX that isn't that dramatic but will draw the audience's attention to the actor in the window. 

8) We will address this and reshoot or cut out if possible the section where Alex looks at the screen. We are going to replaced the scene with a different camera shot from the floor to avoid both the reflection and the fact Alex looks at the camera. 

Before

After

9) We are going to get rid of this POV shot or shift it somewhere else to make more sense. However looking at it, the POV is needed as it shows the Protagonist actually seeing the box through his eyes. We feel it gives a better effect that just seeing him walk towards the box.

10) We are not sure about this change because the idea of the box was to hide the fact the gun is in the box; so basically a disguise. HOWEVER we are taking it into consideration and we may change the box to something scientific.

12) We have deleted a cut of Alex trying to find the gun. Luckily the hands match up and look like the scene was never there - it looks much better now.

13) We are currently in the middle of changing this sound to most likely the sound of a door slamming instead of glass; mainly because we were worried that in most films they tend to show the audience what has been smashed - and in the location we have there isn't anything glass. BUT we may put it in for effect along with a door slam to perhaps give the impression the glass was broke outside the door that was slammed.

14) Here we have attempted to delete bits of the cut to make the improvements, however it didn't seem to work so instead we have decided to speed that section up so that the camera is not behind the coat for too long.

16) We are going to search online for a better gun shot SFX

17) We really like the sound of this idea, we are going to have an attempt at improving out titles.

18, 19, 20) The continuity of Alex's arm we had noticed and are going to reshoot, we have slowed down the scene of the Antagonist smirking and the sound we have only used in a little part of the clip now to add a bit of depth and spookiness to the film and got rid of the sound being on a long section of our film. 

Evidence of Ident Construction

    I used a software programme called After Effects to create my production team's ident. You may remember from a previous post under the name "My Production Team name" where we mentioned the ideas that we had about how we wanted our ident to look.
    We hoped to have some type of dragon going across the screen to symbolise all of our interests in mythological beasts and some sort of flame with either a jar or chains with the name JARLINC burned into it.
    What we resulted in seems SO much better:

We used a preset behaviour (template) for the base of our ident, and added in our Production Team name:

the creation process of my ident 

Evidence of Editing

The editing process took FOREVER to complete to a good standard. We spent every day for 2 weeks till 6:00-6:30pm cutting, speeding up, altering our clips to create good match-on-actions and effects and adding in soundtracks and SFX to create more atmosphere for our film.     

Screen Shots of editing:

    

    One MAJOR thing we changed in our film was the lighting. We altered it from being in colour to greyscale. We decided to do this because it seemed to fit in much better with the type of film we had created. It also solved much of our lighting problems where we couldn't see our Antagonist in the dark scenes like shots 38+ where he is standing half hidden in the shadows.

Before                                        After

 We used the effect video filter called Destaturate to make our film have the greyscale effect throughout our film.

    We chose to speed up and slow down certain aspects of our film to create tension or to make bits of scenes have more of an effect: such as the smirk in scene 42 when the Antagonist smirks just before he fires the gun. This we slowed down so that the audience has the chance to see it before the screen goes black; bringing out the Antagonist's personality as cruel, malicious and evil.

This was the how we altered the speed of our shots

Screen Shots of sound editing:

    The sound editing process was tackled by all of us, with me at the mouse. We watched our completed edited film through twice before picking a suitable soundtrack for it called: _Dark Tension_ (FreeSFX.com).

Once we found this we went on to find any other SFX sounds or parts of other soundtracks to add even more tension and atmosphere to our film due to the fact our film has no dialogue in it to explain what is going on.

    We picked _The Dark Underground Ticket_ sound (a ghost wailing sort of noise - from FreeSFX.com) to add the eerie, ghost effect of the Antagonist being a shadow type figure created by the Protagonist's mind. We thought this would be effective over the _Dark Tension_ soundtrack because it seemed like it gave depth to the horror/Thriller effect we wanted.

    The sound we used at the scene where the Protagonist turns on the light was used to add tension when the light comes back on and the Shadow has disappeared. The deep BUMVVV sort of noise creates the atmosphere.