Final Edit - class reviews

We got our class to sit down together and watch each others final edits and gave each other positives of our end product and some stuff that we could change to make it better if we could go back and re-edit.
+ The positives that we got were that they liked the inserts such as the window and the slanted hallway shot:












+ They also thought that our music worked well with our piece as it fit what kind of atmosphere that we are trying to create and a lot of our shots mimicked the beats of the music.
+ They also thought that we created a good enigma as they could tell what was going on but couldn't imagine what was going to happen and wanted to know more.
+ They liked the hardest part of our final edit which was the ambient sound, this was hard as we constantly had criticism about it and we tried really hard to make it work and sort out these problems.
+ The titles on the piece were positively spoke about as they told us that they were well placed so that you could read all of them clearly and they had nice font that didn't look ridiculous and very professional.
+ Our class also said that they liked the variation of our getting ready shots as they weren't the usual and boring getting ready scenes, they said that they were unique and kept the suspense of the thriller the same as it was in the shots before.

However there were some improvements that they touched upon which we took into consideration and we realised these faults that we didn't notice when editing, if we had more time to go back and edit then we would definitely change these as we think that they would make our final piece perfect. The negatives were that:

- The title where it says 'Directed by David and Guy' is very informal compared to our other titles, therefore it probably should have read as 'Directed by David Thomas and Guy Nicholson'.
- They also spotted that there was a slight wobble at the end of the shot where Matt is being watched whilst walking across the playground, we tried to combat this problem before however we didn't cut enough off to enable people not to see anything.

Thriller opening scene - Final Edit

Thriller opening scene - bird noises

For our window insert we wanted some sound that would fit with the insert so we thought of putting in some bird sounds as through the window it was an over grown garden, we thought the Blackbird sound in the first few seconds of this clip would fit just right, the bird noise finishes at 20 seconds:

Thriller opening scene - Third draft review

The overall opinion from the people that we asked is that we need to include more original ambient sound, we have looked through some of our original footage where ambient sound would fit perfectly. We found two scenes where it would fit and the audio was of great quality, these are when Matt is taking off his coat jacket and when he is walking down  the long corridor. Here is two screenshots of the scenes that we are going to include ambient sound in:

Thriller opening scene - Third draft opinions

We asked Chris and Molly what they thought of our third draft and whether we had improved on their criticisms and what they thought we could do better, they both said that it was good that we added in ambient sound however it sounded very plain in many areas and that we should get more of our original sound into the piece. As all we had used was the breaking of glass sound under feet which wasn't our original sound it was one that we found off of YouTube:

Thriller opening scene - third draft

Thriller opening scene - sound effects for the hallway

We needed some more sounds for our piece that wasn't our soundtrack and we felt that due to the poor conditions of the ground in the hallway that we shot David's character in, this was because our original ambient sound that was recorded whilst shooting this was not good as it had voices and other noises that were not good enough for our piece.

Thriller opening scene - second draft review

In our second draft opinions post we were told of a flaw that we have in our second draft which we know we need to change, both people said that we need to build our soundscape more and to do this we need to go through our shots and collect all of the ambient sound that is present and insert it into our piece where appropriate, hopefully it will be in our third draft if not then we will create a fourth to showcase it.

Thriller opening scene - first draft review

After getting feedback from our peers on our first draft of our thriller opening we decided to take some of their advice and change our thriller to combat these flaws. One of our comments was that our soundtrack was too repetitive, this was due to our soundtrack being 20 seconds long therefore we had to cut and paste it over and over again to last the full length of time. We have changed our soundtrack to a lengthier piece which lasts the full amount of time that we need it to, therefore it is not repetitive and we feel that is fits our piece well.

We were also told that we needed to add more titles throughout the film, so we went from three titles to six not including the production company name and the title of the thriller. Here are a few examples of the ones we added in: 

Thriller opening scene - second draft opinions

Thriller opening scene - first draft opinions

Thriller opening scene - opinions of our production company titles

To see if our production company opening is good enough for our project we wanted to get the opinions of some of our classmates and others around the college, this means that we can change anything that the people don't like or redesign it to make it better. These are their opinions of this production title:

Emily Brookes: 'I am very impressed with it and it looks very professional, the music also fits well with the title and makes each word and the name in general stand out more.'

Finley O'Neill: 'I like the concept of the title and thought it was done to a very professional standard, the sound effects work well and the transitions flow very nicely.'

Thriller opening scene - Production company sounds 2

For our production company logo which shows up at the start of our thriller project we used this sound for when 'Legend' comes up onto the screen this makes the word 'legend' stand out more as it appears on screen, this is similar to the sound effect that we put onto the word 'entertainment'. The sound that we used is at 4:47 in this clip and is labelled Horror Loop 2. This will help it to have more of a professional feel to it and similar to how an actual production company would do it.

Thriller opening scene - Production company sounds

We used the sound effect that starts at 0:11 of this YouTube video, we put it at the start when 'Entertainment' on our production company video flashes up at the start of our thriller piece to make our production company stand out and be like the actual professional ones you see like Paramount and Dreamworks. This allows us to create a more professional feel to our piece.

Thriller opening scene - The Hunt second draft

Thriller Opening Scene - Actor update

We still have Matt as our main actor but we added in a new actor as a stalker to our main character.
The person we chose was David as he is 6"2 which can fit the description of a stereotypical pursuer and he is already an established actor inside the school/college and goes to a drama school. This is a picture of David and he is the person on the left hand side of the picture: