Final Cut - Feedback

Today we watched each group's final cut and gave feedback to each.
These were the following comments we received.

The Good

- Interesting Storyline
- Main Protagonist is introduced
- Clever use of card tag titles
- Good smooth camerawork
- Obvious and clear genre
- Showed good conventions of RomCom/Teens genre (paper with ELLIE)
- Opening sets the rest of the film up well.
- Soundtrack fits with the genre
- Good use of props (books, paper, costumes)
- Initial questions (Why is he trying to impress her)

To Improve

- Soundtrack was a little repetitive
- Not much happens in the scene (could be due to long shot of Ollie)

Final Cut

Editing

After much editing, we uploaded the final video to garage-band so we were able to fit our music to the video. It took a while to get the soundtrack to fit the video, as we wanted the music to change a little when some of the shots changed, so this took a while to ensure that the music still sounded okay and carried on fitting the genre. We had to change some parts of the music, like changing and moving the tracks so the suitable tunes came in at the right time.

There was a moment of bicker where we wanted to decide whether we wanted to have a brief silence as this technique is a typical convention used to create awkwardness to viewers. In the end, we focused on making sure the shakers and acoustic guitars came it at the exact times when the shot of name tags were removed with the panning shot following next.

Teacher Comments

Further to our conversation in class yesterday, you have already taken forward many of the action points that came out of it, but just as a reminder they were:

- Create a new music track in Garageband
- Continue editing for the final cut taking care to do the following: break up the overly long shots of the title cards and the two central characters, and intercut these segments so that you achieve regular and appropriately paced parallel editing between the title cards and the main action.
- Either by using existing footage (or maybe by re-shooting?), try to 'establish' the interior of the classroom containing your two central characters before you cut to the aerial shot of Ollie asleep on the desk. This will provide better spatial awareness for your audience and contextualise the space and place that the following action will play out.

Re-shoot

We've discussed that we may re-shoot the classroom due to the low scale of shots we have for the continuity of the credit titles. Some of these shots will include both Ollie and Beth so we are going to need the exact clothing we had on the first day of our shoot. This plan will be considered an alternative unless if we can fix the long duration shots in our opening sequence.

One of these shots included the establishment shot of when the dolly pans into the classroom as we noticed that Beth was sitting on one the front desks after the credit titles.

As a reminder, the props are as follows

- Hoodie (Clothing for Ollie)
- Purple strap bag
- Textbook/Notepad

Soundtrack Enquiry / Final Cut Post-production

We were informed by our teacher that we weren't allowed to use pre-rendered soundtracks by other artists. This was announced by one of the media examiners who stated that our soundtrack had to consist creative content made by ourselves if our final cut is to be accepted. This means we've had to delete our song by Offspring.

Our current task now is to create a new soundtrack from Garage Band and we've decided to include some idea's from the music in our animatic storyboard. We also received some feedback from our teacher who suggested that we make some cuts in between the credits so we could work on more continuity editing. This would also visually make the opening more interesting to look out when we have a variety of shots placed together.

To do this, we decided to find to go back and trim some of the shots of Ollie sleeping on the desk. The editors decided that we should fit these clips in between the credit titles and making sure that they were in chronological order.

As well as that, we found out that the ideal duration for the opening sequence should be 2 minutes. Because our current rough cut is 3 minutes, it was recommended to us that we trim a few clips. We thought that this should apply to the credit titles as they tend to linger for at least half of the screen time.

Soundtrack Progress

Ollie has assigned himself to work on the soundtrack. For the tunes, he's included a variety of calm acoustic guitars a long with some shaker and tambourine beats. He's decided to try experiment with a more lighter and innocent tone with opening song but still trying to keep that upbeat comedy theme.

Video Editing Progress

We've cropped our rough cut footage from 3 minutes to 2 minutes 20 seconds. Even though we're 20 seconds over the ideal time (2 minutes maximum). There was absolutely nothing we could do to improve the pacing if we decided to trim more shots.