Evaluation | Next Years Targets

My group and I have enjoyed producing this opening scene as part of our course. If we could go back and do anything differently, it might be planning a little further ahead than we did to make sure we have good weather throughout filming and a bright location to film in. Lighting was probably our biggest problem as it did take away the realism from our scene as it was obvious that the 2 minutes of screen-time had actually been several hours in real-time. Our target for improving mise-en-scene is to correct this by choosing a better location to film in than a dense forest that blocks out most sunlight, although this change in location would have happened anyway as we would want to create a completely different film.

Focusing on camera composition, we think a realistic target for next year if we really want to up our game is to use a better camera to film our trailer. The cameras we used this year did the job but a lot of the ideas we had that involved switches in focus or changes in zoom had to be scrapped because the camera did not have the capability to do it. We want to film in a higher quality and be more free in what shots we want to achieve without having the limitation of what our camera can actually do. This would allow us to have those shots we planned to have where we can direct the audiences attention to different places in the shot by using focus. 

In terms of editing, I think we did quite well this year as we managed to get pretty much exactly what we wanted to get out of our shots using software we were inexperienced in. Creating and placing the opening credits was probably the hardest thing to do but we managed to get our heads round it eventually. Our target for next year would probably be to make our editing slightly different by experimenting with different cuts between shots. This should be especially important in making a trailer as there will no doubt be more locations we will be filming in so we will need a more obvious cut between shots to differentiate these parts of the film. 

Finally we need to improve sound. This was another tricky part of production as in some shots our actors were far away from the camera and yet we still needed to hear what they were saying. It was also tricky to balance the sound of the background music and the voices of our characters so neither overpowered the other. Our target for next year is to take advantage of post-production sound recording, to overdub the dialogue after we film it so that it sounds clear to the audience and better overall. If we can work on these 4 technical areas and achieve our targets, our trailer next year should be very good.