Emma Tracy AS Media: April 2013

Evaluation of our film 'Seized'

My name is Emma Tracy. I am the one on the right of the screen. My candidate number is 3371.

Audience feedback

We decided to do a proper survey for our audience feedback and did it on Survey Monkey. These were our results...

Today was our deadline and we still had a few things to clean up in our 2 minute opening. We focused mainly on sound and making sure it was in the right place in the sequence. We also changed our opening logo and I edited it on Adobe Photoshop to black and white to make it have a better effect. After spending all day finalising our film and making sure everything was in the right place at the right time, we just had one more thing to do. This was changing the aspect ratio to make the film have the black lines running across the top and bottom of the whole sequence to make it look more like a proffessional film. This took us quite a while as we had to do it for each clip individualy and so it took at least 30 minutes to do. Once all of this was done, our 2 minute opening of a film called Seized was complete.

Editing - day 6

On day 6 we still had a few things to do in our editing process. We needed to clear up the editing together of the shots but we also did things such as colour correction or the whole of the film, our production logo for the beginning and finding eerie music to put throughout the whole of the 2 minutes. We managed to get the colour correction, and production logo into the sequence and we managed to find the eerie music for the 2 minutes. This finalised our 6th day.

Editing - Day 4 and 5

Days 4 and 5 were used primarily for titles, sounds and effects. The sounds didn't take too long as we just needed to import them and put them in the right place on the time line. This was the same story for any effects that we added in. However, the titles took a day and half of the next day as they were tricky to do and we had to practise how to do them. We decided to do our names in 'typewriter' as it fitted in with the mobile phone theme as it looked like someone was texted the names on the screen. This took us a while to figure out but once we got going it was just about patience. We also decided that it would be a good idea to put in a few facts about phones and the Internet at the beginning. This would get people thinking and engaging in the film already even at 10 seconds into it. Finally we thought about how the title of our film would come into it and what font it would be in. We thought it should come in on its own on a black background in big, white, bold text so it stood out even more. This worked really effectively and it makes a bold statement.

Editing - Day 2 and 3

We needed to make the footage that we had already put in place look a lot smoother and make sure that the shots fitted perfectly from one into the next. We spent quite a while in this process as we wanted it to look professional and not scruffy. Whilst doing this we changed around the order of some of the shots and played around a bit as to what goes where. This concluded day 3.

Editing - Day 1

The first day was just making sure we got the gist of the order of the film and so we put the clips all in their general position. When we edited together the montage for the phones, we did it at a fast pace but we thought that if we started it off fast and then it got even faster it would create a much better effect on the audience. We did the same effect for the very end of the 2 minutes where we have the P.O.V of the man running collated with the shots of the dead people. When we picked up the pace of this it looked a lot more panicked and more effective.

Shooting journal - Day 4

On our final day of shooting we managed to get every piece of footage that we needed including the correct car footage, the final phone footage, the extra shots of the fair, the extra shots of the dead people and the sounds that we needed (wind, car engine, heavy breathing) and we can now edit it together successfully and make it look like our genre of a horror/psychological thriller and we can show what the phones has got to do with it in a lot more detail.

Shooting journal - Day 3

On this day we were in school and we had to find lots of different places to film different people using their mobile phones in different situations. This would be for the montage at the beginning of the film to show the buzz that was going on in the world before the tragedy. We went out to different places in and out of the school grounds including a car, a park bench and a side walk. We filmed these shots all in one day and uploaded them to the Mac's so we could get on and edit.

Shooting journal - Day 2

We were going to keep the original footage of the people getting out of the car but the fair had moved around and nothing was in the same place anymore and the lighting of the day wasn't the same. Also, we felt that we needed more of a variety of shots for the car scene as it would show our different skills of shooting. Although this day of shooting was more successful than the last, when we got together and edited it together we decided that we still needed more shots that would make it look a lot better.

Shooting journal - Day 1

On the first day of shooting our film, it was for the original idea with the panning shot of the fair. The filming for this went well apart from the panning shot. We got some good technical shots in there as well but when we got back together at school we decided that there was no way of telling what had made these people die and there was no real link to the mobile phones. Because of this we had to find another day to shoot our film that we'd updated with the montage of people using their phones at the beginning.

Alterations to our 2 minute opening

We have had quite a few hiccups in our filming process which we have had to get our heads round and sort out. The first thing we did was we changed the panning shot to more still shots of the fair as we thought that the panning shot gave the sense that there was someone alive in the deserted fair. We wanted to create the sense that no one was there and this is the effect that the still shots give. Another thing we found when we originally filmed is that there wasn't really any sign that the deaths were to do with social networking and phones. To make this more obvious we have shot 5 different phone set ups for 5 different people and we have edited them all together to show that before the deaths there was lots of activity. This shows the contrast between life and death. It also shows the whole film is about phones and this creates enigma. The final thing we are doing is a P.O.V shot of one of the alive characters running through the fair and finding dead bodies with phones in their hands and blood coming out of their ears to show that they are dead. With all these shots put together, at the beginning there is a sense of life with a fast pace, then in the middle it slows down to show the sense of death and desertification and finally at the end the pace picks up again to represent the panic of the character.