Ellie's Prelim Evaluation

In my previous blog, entitled Ellie's Prelim Video, I posted the final version and of mine and group 11's prelim video, a short clip in the style of a crime thriller showing the interview which takes place between police and suspect. In this blog, I am going to evaluate that video and describe what I thought worked and what could have been improved upon.

To begin with, our short video did not follow our storyboard exactly. This is because some of the clips which we filmed turned out to be unusable (because they were either too short, or people were laughing in them). This meant that we didn't actually have enough footage to cover our entire storyboard, making it only 50 seconds long when we planned for it to be more like 1 min 30 secs.

This also meant that the video didn't even follow our brief properly - it was meant to start off with somebody walking into a room and sitting opposite another character. Although we planned for this, and filmed it too, we had to cut it out during the editing process. I have learned that it's important to check that the footage you film is useable and what you want it to be, and to do it lots of times also to make up for any problems you may have later.

However, having said that I don't think it was a total disaster; we worked with the footage that we had and it turned out to flow quite well and it made sense also. There were a few other small problems with the video, such as the fact that you can see somebody standing outside the door waiting for their cue to walk into the room about 30 seconds before they were meant to! But overall I think that our prelim video was a success because we demonstrated our understanding of the 180 rule, and we also created some nice over-the-shoulder shots (another aspect of the brief).

Incorporated into our prelim clip was also the use of sound effects - when we watched the video after editing it, we realised that you couldn't properly hear the knocking of the door before the 3rd police officer walks into the room. For this reason, we added the sound effect of a door knocking from Soundtrack Pro during the editing process. We would have also included elements of foley sound, however there was not much need nor time. On reflection, this could have been a nice touch to our clip and if we'd done it to a better standard then foley sound would definitely have featured.