film critique

For the film project my area of responsibility was editing and sound design and acting in the film. Problems that arose in my area of responsibility was that I never worked on or edited a film before so I had to learn and learn fast. I solved my problem of never editing before by having to work on a final cut pro tutorial. In the final cut pro tutorial I learned the basics of final cut pro like how to cut pieces, ad transitions and input files and tracks in order to make things run smoothly. During the final cut pro tutorial some problems arose that I had to learn how to fix. These problems were ones like how to fix. For working on the sound for my project, I had to learn how to use garage band which wasn’t to hard it was mostly just drag and drop files onto the sound track and put them in order so that when they played it was everything ran smoothly. But a major problem that came up in garage band was trying to take an instrument piece and crate your own music. This was the biggest problem for garage band because first off I had to find the right track of sound in garage band that matched the idea of sound I had for the specific scene in the movie. That was a challenge because garage band only had a few instruments that I was able to edit on. Also once I found the instrument that would work with the scene I was editing on I would have to look for the right sounds that it could produce within that specific sound track. Another very challenging aspect of garage band was I was pressed for time as I edited the whole movie first then went on to work on the music for each scene, since I was pressed for time at points I couldn’t make my own music and had to use pre-maid tracks in garage band. My final area of responsibility was actually acting in the film; I was the main character so I was in almost all the shots. One problem that rose here was never really acting before so I didn’t know how to convey the emotions that the character was supposed to show, a lot of the scenes looked a little awkward because I didn’t put forth all the emotion that I needed to make the character act like he was supposed to. Another problem of acting in the movie was that I had to change my schedule around to meet the times that we needed to shoot. Even though in my area of work for this project I had a lot to learn in juts a little time I felt that I completed my parts and added to the whole film contribution. For the overall project a problem I noticed was that on certain scenes we didn’t shoot it all the way through but we shot it in just the pieces from the angles that we thought were best and because of this certain parts from the scene were missing. For example we had a shot where Trevor was supposed to walk in through a hallway and into his office sit down and conduct the interview but we never shot the scene all the way through instead we shot it in specific parts like Trevor walking in the hallway then of his feet walking into his office and of him conducting the interview. Because we shot it in this broken up matter we never got a shot of Trevor actually sitting down in his desk. We just shot the scenes which we thought were important and because of this we skipped over little details that we did not notice because they didn’t play drastic parts in the whole scene. Because we didn’t get those little details in the shot the scenes often had to be manipulated that brought the viewers attention away from what was going on in the scene to the manipulations we put in. Other times that we didn’t do a full run through of the shot we missed details that added to the narrative story and because those details were missing the story at times didn’t make sense or confused the audience and we had to manipulate the shots or repeat shots so that the story could still be understood even with out those shots. For example one of the shots was supposed to be of the main character coming out of his day dream and saying “No I would never get the job I have to go to the date”. But we missed that scene and because of this we had to repeat the shot of the main character looking at the picture of the date and then running out of the house to make the scene flow and try to keep the narrative story intact so that the audience could still have some idea of what was going on in the film. Also in the overall project some scenes seemed to be missing parts and because of the missing parts seemed useless to the narrative story. For example there is a scene where the main character stares at a picture of the girl he is going on a date with and the shot is held their for a few seconds. There are parts missing where it was supposed to show all the things he believed a girl would want, flowers jewelry etc, but we were never able to get hat shot and because we couldn’t get those images that shot lingers for a while and bores or distracts the audience. Another time where this happens is when the main character crashes into someone on a bike and gets knocked out, the camera then zooms in slowly on his face until the main characters eyes shoot open and he gets up and keeps on going. This scene lingers on for to long and distracts the audience because of the shots we were missing, during the slow zoom in on the main characters face it was supposed to show what he believed what would happen if he didn’t go to the date: the girl leaves the park, when he gets there she is kissing some other guy, when he sees here again he gets slapped. Since we didn’t have those scenes the zoom on this face is to drawn out and dos not add to the story and just bores the audience. The reasons we were not able to get those scenes is because we didn’t notice that we were missing or needed those shots until a week or two after we had finished shooting and since so much time had passed some members had other commitments they had to go to and could not find the required time to shoot the missing scenes. Even though we were missing some shots we our group was still able to get the main narrative of the film across by having to take a more creative route into successfully putting all the shots together so that it all made sense, by either repeating sense or adding in transitions.

Evidence

Oct 21 First day of shooting was relatively simple with no mic needed just had some trouble seeing if we got sound or not at first are camera operator had to go in some funny spots Oct 28 Finalized version of two column script checked over  Oct 29 Second day of shooting. 5 hours of shooting helped us finish most of our movie, i was acting so we had to get our lighting to hold the boom mic but I checked over it at times  Nov 2 Finishing up Final Cut Pro Nov 2 shooting again today got some running scenes in, got to watch as very one else tried to work the moving camera rig thing Nov 3 looking up videos trying to figure out how they use sound Nov 5 filmed again had to redo a shot because the lighting was bad, not much audio in that shot so it was a simple day Nov 10 - 14 after school editing with Trevor, working on finishing up movie and sound