Evaluation Charlie Price

Evaluation
After watching the completed 2 minute film my group produced, I feel very please and happy with how it has turned out. We decided to create an extract from a thriller/horror film. It is about a forensic and a detective standing over a body in the forest, and accounting how he died. Every time the forensic or detective says something about his death, (e.g. his fingers were broken here) there would be a quick flash back, to it actually happening to the victim. Much like the film Se7en and the CSI series. The extract we chose to produce would be at the very start of the film, and would immediately set up a definite plot for the rest of the film. We thought about many ideas along these lines, like criminals hiding a body or a police chase. But we thought this idea would create more of any impact, as the flashbacks would be very effective.
Our opening shot with the victim lying on the floor, and the forensic and detective standing over him was well thought through; we had to make the scene look like a real forensic area. We did this by putting number cards on various places in the scene and having the detective in a suit and the forensic in white overalls. It was crucial for us to get these costumes and the forensic materials, so when the scene began viewers were totally aware that it was a forensic crime scene. Otherwise it would have looked ridiculous. Between the detective and forensic we decided to have the victim, Charlie Roke, lying down, with his face turned away from the camera. We thought this would be more effective, making it seem more sinister. Being the sound director, I had to create new background sounds on the computer for this seen. As the original speech was obscured badly by the wind. I decided to create typical forest sounds in the background, for example, birds tweeting and a stream flowing. In fact, I tried to create this atmosphere all the way through the film, on the present day scenes.

In the fight scenes, inside the victim’s house it was very hard to edit out the buzzing noise of the camera, as so much of the sound was picked up because it was such a small room. This meant I had to take out all the original sound and speech and add various different sound tracks and voiceovers in place of these. Even though the amount of sound effects was so vast and there were so many of them, it was still very hard to find one specific sound effect for every sound in every scene, which we had. This meant I had to play around with the sound effects I had, for example playing them backwards or cutting out very small parts of them for the sound I wanted in the scene. I did this well in the indoor fight scene, cutting down the sound effects “walking up stairs” and “chopping wood”, and fitting them into the victim getting thrown off his chair and kicked in the head. The lighting was also dimmed a lot in the past tense scenes; this was because we wanted to make it clear to the viewer that this was the past tense, a flashback. During this seen we also put in an extreme close up, when he is being held at the throat. This is because we wanted to make it really serious, as you can see the pen pushing into the victims neck a lot, but you cannot see the faces of the victim or the attack, making it seem more sinister and eerie.
During the flashbacks which were outdoors, in the woods, I also had to add in background sound effects. But I chose to have the outside flashback scenes dominated by the “blast of wind” sound effect, this makes the scene seem even more dangerous and grim and adds to the tension of a kidnap and a murder that is about to happen. I also used it, simply as a major contrast between flashback, and present tense scenes, to make it clearer for the viewer.
We did not include the actual killing blow dealt to the victim. We thought this would be hard to do and if we did manage to do it, it wouldn’t be incredibly effective and might look a bit stupid. Instead we just shot the killer raising the murder weapon, and then the victim falling to the floor afterwards. This worked much better as in many psychological horrors, the actual blow or attack isn’t shown, only the aftermath.
Overall I am very pleased with how it turned out, I would love to be in charge of sound in future projects because it was very enjoyable and rewarding.

Thomas Pinney

Film sequence evaluation

From watching the two-minute clip our group made I am pleased although feel that it is very different to what I visioned it would be like. We attempted to create a scene near the beginning of a film which entails a rural murder through flashbacks and crime scene analysis. The general approach to this scene was a similar approach to that of the tv series C.S.I.(2000-Ann Donahue) in terms of crime scene analysis while the murder is similar to Pyschos’ (1960-Alfred Hitchock) shower scene. Especially in looking back it seems that there were some good ideas but were not properly fulfilled or focused on.

As this is within the detective/crime genre we as a group had many influences as this is a very familiar and well used genre. We ended having a very similar approach to C.S.I. (2000-Ann Donahue). because of the dialogue over the top which explains everything in technical terms while there was an element of giving little information to the viewer letting the viewer make sense of it. This idea of making conclusions from artefacts, evidence and short unusual shots for me was influenced by a memomarable scene in Tarkovskys Stalker (1979-Andrei Tarkovsky) I tried to recreate this through my cinematography with shots of reflections and close up shots of certain items and parts although much of it did not go with our adopted style similar C.S.I (2000-Ann Donahue) so much was cut although there is a clear reference in some of the shots such as left. We as a group also understood that this clip will stand out as being in a very English setting and could be recognizable as a British horror. Because of this we looked to similar films and Dead Mans Shoes (2004-Shane Meadows) came to mind. We decided that it would be a good thing to set the scene at the beginning of the clip with still shots of the landscape similar to the beginning of ‘Dead Mans Shoes’ and ‘Deliverance’. This contrast of raw natural beauty and stark terror is a very affective tool which has been tried and tested in this genre for a while. We tried this out although (see screens) when editing the film it seemed to ruin the flow of it and take up too much time. Also when thinking about how to film our murder scene we thought it would be useful to take some aspects of Hitchcocks’ shower scene in Psycho (1960-Alfred Hitchcock) We wanted to use the same features of very small frantic shots of obscure bits to create a sense of terror and mystery although this was not fully adapted in the final edit as Hitchcock used around fifty shots in just two minutes while ours has a comparatively tiny amount and so was not as successful.

I believe we worked well as a group and generally was well organised. We began the task by having proper and indepth brainstorms on possible ideas and techniques. We covered pretty much every aspect and this meant we got a broad range of ideas form each member and then could try some of these ideas out. We didn’t start filming straight away and put an importance into planning as we had a reckie to the location before filming to deepen our understanding and feeling of the place. This helped a lot with the direction and for me the possibilities of interesting shots in the cinematography. As we attempted to film most of the possible ideas it meant we could easily adopt and experiment with different possibilities. On the whole each persons section worked well with the others such as the fast paced editing and sound effects which wok together to give a good rhythm and complement each other well.

We did not really encounter any serious technical difficulties or problems and our technical skill was proficient enough to see us through. We became a lot more familiar with Final Cut and found out more features and effects. We also learnt to see the importance of organisation and planning. On looking back I’m quite pleased although find it very different to how we all thought and hoped it would turn out. By watching it back ourselves and feedback from other people we found out that there are some things which could be done differently and improved. The main points were, first of all, making the clip more ambiguous as it leaves little for the viewer to interpret and think about especially considering we do not give too much away when this is at the beginning of the film. This could be done through many things like the voiceover saying less, more obscure and closer shots, faster editing and narrative aspects like anonymity of characters. Also effects like sound and colour filters could be done with a bit more precision to help the clip flow and make it look more professional. Another aspect was the lack of character building or apparent importance to any of them.

Evaluation
In our film I took the role of being the editor, our film was based on the genre of crime/detective films. It is about a man who is in debt with a group of drug dealers and it results in him being kidnapped and killed, when he is then later found and detectives and forensics start inspecting his body they see flashbacks of how he was killed. One film that is similar to ours is the film Seven.
When we first uploaded the footage to the computer and started to extract parts it became clear that we did not have all the correct footage as we were missing some indoor scenes, so to work around that obstacle we decided to build the film up with the footage we had and leave spaces for what we still needed to film. This gave us a poor view of what our film was like as it had lots of blank spaces where you could not follow the story.
We then filmed the rest of the footage and once we had uploaded it and the gaps where filled it started to take some shape and actually started to have a narrative to it. I think the narrative developed due to the change of time within the film and the how the audience feel when a different character is on screen.
Then to try and give the audience the feel of what was happening in the film, and what we had in our heads of how we wanted the film to be like, we used white flashes between each change of scene, this started to make the flashbacks look much clearer to the audience as it meant they had to remember what has been identified for less time before it is shown, and they started to pull the film together what also helped with this is the fact that the flashbacks were considerably shortened.. Although the white flashes worked really well with the film it was not one of the original ideas for how the flashbacks were going to be introduced to the film, I was going to fade them in by altering the brightness of the shot and then fading it out again when the flashback was over, but we decided to fade two shots at the end to give the effect of how the killer has no sympathy for the victim. The flashbacks are best linked to the television series’ such as Criminal Minds and CSI as they have a very similar story line to our film.
Another area of the editing that was different from the original plans was how it was put together the original plan was to have the flashbacks first then from them lead into the forensic investigator and the detective explaining it, but through a mutual decision we decided it would be better if we had the flashbacks after the forensic and detective explaining what happened, as when done that way it builds up the narrative in a much better way. I also changed the length of the flashbacks from having the forensic and detective explain a long list of misfortunes that the victim received and then a long flashback showing them all in a slow flashback, but we were told that it doesn’t really work we decided to cut all the clips at the end of each description and put in a short and fast changing flash back to give more of an effect, as I think it makes it seem like the victim received more assault than he necessarily did as it is shown throughout the whole film.
The way in which I edited it was to try and get the audience to have a different reaction to different parts of the sequence, by doing this we have tried to get parts of the sequence to make the audience feel sympathetic towards the victim of the killing.
To help the narrative I put in some colour brightness and contrast filters on the different scenes, for example on the scenes when there is the forensic and detective examining the body we made it a very brown and dull filter to go onto all of them scenes throughout the film, we then had a cold filter with deep dark blues on the indoor scenes with the killer, finally we had light reds with low brightness for when the killer is outside with the victim to try and give the effect that it is night time/early morning.
Finally at the end of the sequence we had quick half a second switches between a shot of the forensic over the body and the killer over the body this therefore gives an intimidating effect for the audience as the last shot is the killer walking away shaking his head with the shot fading.

Hey, I'm thinking we need props to make this scene half decent but not shitty with bare cliche stuff. So bring anything realy nd we may ahve a use for it. We can keep it at college.

http://www.staffs.ac.uk/schools/sciences/forensic/crimescenehouse/bedroom.jpg
http://cache3.asset-cache.net/xc/sb10062974e-001.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=6C4008C0FD9EB5A5D4EA9BFCB417073D1C8B733DE2CC9794674D2DF51B0C3327D4B40B3E875A785D

The idea is to base the story on a man who gets murdered at the start of the film and it is attempting to find out who was the killer and the scene which we are going to use is near the begining of the film which is a flashback of how it happened.

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