Moving image, Evaluation

Moving image
Entertain and evaluate

Product evaluation
¬
Over all I feel I have met the brief well and the video I produced related to the codes and conduction of many helpline videos and advertisements that I have researched for this brief.
One of the main problems which came with the whole brief, was the fact that my organizational skills were poor. I spent to long trying to come up with an original idea and got stuck around one concept with I now have come to realise wouldn’t have works as it would have come off unsympathetic, even untactful. I just wanted to make a hard hitting almost disturbing film which would really make the audience pay attention. But through my classes feedback and further research I found I needed to have some kind of positive outcome.
I really wanted to create this video using 3D visuals. This is because I really want to focus on 3D on my course so I have lots of projects I can show on my show-reel. My original idea would have meant I would have had to create the character in Maya, human feature modeling and animation is something I have not even attempted, I spent a few day trying to create my character with a disappointing outcome so decided I wanted to keep to a similar version of my idea but shoot it all on film. This didn’t really bother me as I really like working in film and have a passion for photography. I felt I could have made this video with some really nice stills using a DSLR, but wanted to use dialogue to portray the characters feelings, also as it turns out I think one of the best part of my video was the acting. The actress I used was some one I knew from the college who had had previously done drama at GCSE and A level. As good as she was, being her friend meant there was little professionalism when it came to filming. Meaning there are not about 45mins of messing about and laughing. As important as it is to be serious and productive on shot, I feel it is a good idea to make sure anyone who is working on a product is having a good time otherwise they loose consecration, get bored and it will show in their performance.
On shoot I had some problems, the nights I had planned to shoot had both poor weather and lighting conditions. This meant I had to just shoot the scenes that were located inside. Again the problems here were down to my organization and choice of location. I choose my friends house as in the scene I wanted it to look quite unkempt and lived in, which this house really is. What I hadn’t thought about was the fact that there would be a house full of people half playing loud instruments. Meaning we had to use one of the top rooms which small and hard to direct the lighting.
Something that did disappoint me was that I wanted to use some more interesting shots which I had researched, such as a pull focus or some interesting depth of field shots, but I found I would have had to use a better camera, special lens and some equipment training.
I started by importing the footage into Final cut. The laborious task was choosing all the clips I wanted, I now know that this could have been made a lot quicker if I had made an EDL ‘editing decision list ‘. This is something I will make sure I do in my future projects. I then went about splicing the video together. I then imported my separate sound recordings and voice over’s, which I edited into my video in-between sound levels to make its sound like the voice was coming from inside her head. I put an eerie echo on these voice over’s to make them sound more like a thought.
After I had edited the whole clip together I brought it in to After Effects and added a tri tone effect on to give it the desolate, bare feel it has now. I played around with the levels and curves, as the lighting in the room was not as well placed as I had initially though. I wanted to take some of the bleached out light and colour off the wall whilst not loosing any of the detail on the character. I then added a anti scratch effects which smoothed out the sequence nicely, and also helped to give it more of a dull smudged look.
I didn’t give myself enough time to edit my piece together for the first presentation of my video. Which meant I couldn’t render out the highest quality HD version, I also had to remove some of the effects I had applied on After effects. This brought the rendering time down to 20 minuets. This was enough to show my first attempt but I would have liked to have rendered it out properly at first.
Another problem I came across was when I came to my second edit was that the After Effects project I originally made was not saved properly which meant I had to make a new sequence and re apply and adjust the same settings as before. This didn’t take as long as it had the first time as I knew what I had to do to make the video look how I wanted it.
If I were to do this project again, I will need to spend a lot more time on organization and time management. Planning a project in full before jumping in to it is essential to a successful product. This includes better analysis of locations and backup plans for days on shoot so that next time the weather wouldn’t be an excuse. I also think that better research right at the beginning of this project would have meant I wouldn’t have spent time over an idea that wasn’t going to work.