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.