Audience Feedback..

We showed our rough cut to the class and I also showed it to a few people at home. most of the feedback estimated a level 3 for my work with the occasional level 4. I was pretty pleased with that overall. Some of the feedback varied from.. 'made me want to know what the rest of the film was about... good use of narration... professional and well edited... establish too much of the film in two minutes... music worked well... too much background noise in cafe scene... felt empathy towards character... varied shots... too dark in the cafe scene... scene in cafe doesn't fit... good range of characters age... good transitions... not too much is given away... emotive narration. Overall I was pleased with the feedback, but because of the negative feedback about the cafe scene and what I felt was the weaker acting during the film I decided to cut it out, plus when I had added my end credits it would have overun the two minutes and I wanted more time to work with, so it was cut out and I pushed it all together. I felt it ran a lot smoother without. I exported two versions, one with the cafe scene in and one without and took them home to show people we all agreed that it looked better without the cafe scene. After the feedback I felt much more confident and positive towards my finished piece.

Editing...

So Editing has been a long and slow process. I've changed my film more times than I can remember. I done the ident pretty early on, while I still rememebered how to do it! I kept the production name of Skyrise productions, just because I liked the sound of it. It sounded big and powerful. I really enjoyed editing and putting together all the clips i'd filmed. However music has been an issue, at first I had all the sort of music in mind that I wanted to use, all from the time period the film was set in 1950's.. artists like Elvis, Buddy Holly that were all mentioned in the book I really wanted to have in the clip, however my teacher told me I couldn't use artists due to copyrights, so I was pretty stuck about that. It took me a while, but I got over it and started looking elsewhere for some copyright music. It wasn't long before I found some great, moving tracks on youtube that were copyright free!!! I was so chuffed and began at once putting them together with my film clips. I spent many many lessons doing the tedious task of slowly cutting and overlaying the music within milliseconds of life to the exact place that I wanted it for maximum effect. I know how important music is in films and the music I had found I knew could really compliment my work and add the emotion I wanted to film. At the end of the day my film opening is the beginning of a story.. an emotional story of a young girl in a very tough situation and I wanted the film to be taken completely seriously and do the book credit if anything! So I rightly spent a lot of time and energy into the music and getting it exactly right, I was particularly pleased with the ending where Evie was sitting on my lap, I mananged to get a really good peak in the music to match beautifully with it and I loved the effect it gave!

Next up and last of all, in a bit of a rush I added on the credits. My friend showed me how as I'd forgotten from when James showed us and once I got the hang of it I was away. I took a long time choosing the font and colour that would sit well on my footage. The start is slow and not very dramatic, so I wanted a soft, elegant font that would easily fade in and then out and would go well with the music. Then at the end I wanted the words; 'Based on the novel..... Fallen Star.... By Joan O'neil.... to show on a blue screen just when the music was reaching it's peak. I knew exactly how I wanted it to look in my head and after a painstaking couple of hours (my computer kept shutting down suddenly, before I could save!!) I finally created that image! We had shown a rough cut to the class previously and mine really was a rough cut! A lot of these changes above were made afterwards and I didn't get to see them on the big screen until we had the big viewing at the end, but I was really happy with how it looked and worked!