Media Exam Evaluation

Post-production

1.      

      What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audiences told us they liked the tacking shots of our female character as she entered the woods as the shot showed clearly her transition from civilisation to isolation. The quick appearance of the antagonist added with loud booms to emphasise his entry added to the fear factor of the trailer and made the audience more fearful of this man. They said the conversation at the beginning conformed to stereotypes and followed filming rules (180, rule of thirds) but seemed rushed and is a reflection of the lack of time we had in our opening and how we maybe should have tried to fit less in and focused on what was needed. This is something we tried to remember at A2 – don’t rush scenes and focus on dialogue and make it seem prominent in the trailer and not rushed.

2.      What editing decisions were made? How did they inform the production?

      We had to cut a lot of footage from our opening two minutes as the original product was over four minutes long whereas the brief stated it needed to be around the two minute mark. This was a hard task but developed our editing skills as we had to be very precise with the shots we chose as we had such a limited amount of time. Overall I think this helped develop our product to a higher standard as every shot had been specifically picked and was trimmed down to just the parts that were necessary.

3.      What particular editing tools were used and to what effect?In Adobe cut was our main tool as we wanted to keep things simple and focus on the shots rather than any fancy editing, trimmer was helpful tool that I found later on as I was editing and was good to cut down clips to only the necessary parts I needed. Sony Vegas was used to create our production credits which were better as I knew more about the software as I had used it before and could therefore produce a higher quality production title. In Sony Vegas trimmer was also used as well as cookie cutter and green screen edit to get an effective blood splatter and the text tool to add “aspire productions” onto the top of it.

4.      How did the post-production process enhance the overall production?

We were able to make a clean cut opening and incorporate the best shots into our opening, by having the tools like trimmer at our disposal to cut down and remove shots we were able to make sure every shot was crucial to our opening and keep the fear factor up throughout.

5.      How have you developed these skills at A2?

At A2 we built on from the skills learnt in Adobe and were able to cut together multiple shots in quick sequences making sure the tempo of the trailer was kept up throughout, we were also able to use Sony Vegas again to use cookie cutter and text to create a production title and added in a black and white and zoom effect to create another one that was of industry standard quality. After using Adobe and Sony Vegas at AS I knew how to use its features more effectively at A2 and could therefore produce a higher quality trailer.