Unit 4 Technical Evaluation

Technical and Aesthetic Qualities. 

One technical aspect of our short film that we feel was a strength was the editing and post-production of the short film. We felt that post-production is where our film really captured the themes and style we wanted to go for, this was achieved through the colour grading and the audio (music and voice over) to intensify the emotion we wanted the audience to feel. The feedback we received was that the, 'music was a good choice and it really matched the theme.' Moreover other feedback said that the, 'editing pace was good' and was in keeping with the style that we tried to create. We felt that at 6:00 there was some of our best work, in terms of post-production for the short film, here the final scene denotes the reveal that the voice over was the letter that our main character was writing to his parents. The crux of the short film we felt was from the depth of the last scene, the voice over coupled with the music, pairing with the visuals made for what we felt was some of the strongest work we have done. We really attempted to encapsulate a professional standard through this scene, and hoped that the audience would recognise this as well. The real strength we felt that could have been highlighted through this scene was how the voice over matched the visuals. Whilst this was something easy to do, the harder part was the timing in between the pieces of voice over, trying hard to not to leave it for too long or too short a time period.  

However in terms of weaknesses, we felt that perhaps the audio (dialogue and background noise) throughout the film could have been improved. Although we did use an external mic for all audio, there was still some background noise in certain scenes which would have lost the engagement of the audience. The feedback that we received was that the, 'sound/audio near the beach, did carry a lot of background noise.' This at the time was harder to control, although we do realise that it was something that we should have tried harder with. Through the scene at the sea front at 2:17 where the friends are walking down the road and talking there was a lot of background noise as well as there being a bit of background noise through the date scene at 3:13. We felt that if this was better then the emotion of the scene would have been kept higher allowing the audience to continue to be engaged as opposed to them becoming disinterested because the audio was not clear enough. In terms of how it may be improved, there was unfortunately not much we could have done in post- production to correct it, we perhaps could have tried to re-record the audio but then there was a risk that the audio would come out too clean and wouldn't be fitting for the scenes visuals. In our opinion to correct this issue we would have liked to go back and re-shoot the whole scenes all together. 

Realisation of proposal

In terms of how accurate the short film was in comparison to our pitch, we felt that there was a good level of detail that could be compared. The more obvious one is the start of the short film in which we said in the pitch that we wanted to start with the track shot at the bus top, which tracks close into the main characters face, showing the levels of anguish he is going through. Within our pitch we did say that we wanted to, 'leave the audience asking questions' which is something that we initially wanted to do from the very start. We felt that within our final product we was able to do this. We further said that we wanted to, 'show the most out of one character' this we felt we also achieved, because the main character featured in every scene of the short film as well, as the other characters only having a max of 2 minutes 30 seconds of screen time. We further stated in our pitch that we wanted to maintain a, 'non-linear structure' which again is something we felt we achieved. Within the short film it continues to revolve around a central location and scene, which is the main character trying to write the letter, but further he has ventures outside of the bedroom in other scenes.

Of course there perhaps were some changes that happened throughout the production of the short film which were different to the pitch. The differences that occurred, were through the structure of scenes. We initially had said that we wanted to end with the main character posting the letter to his parents. However upon review and discussions we found that the film strengthened when this scenes was put at the start rather then the end. It was a change that we actually was quite happy with because we felt that the ending of the short film , grew in strength by ending with the final pieces of voice over and finishing the letter he was writing. whilst this may have been a weakness in terms of deviating from our initial ideas, we felt that in order for the short film to grow it was a change that needed to happen.

Fitness for purpose, audience

The target audience profile that we identified within our pitch was a 19 year old male living in an urban area such as London, with interests in similar films and TV programmes such as the pursuit of happyness and peaky blinders, with all ethnicities included. We felt that we could strongly engage an audience with our short film, with the audience feedback saying that, 'technically it was near professional standard.' The audience further said that the technical aspects of our film were exceptional which is something we really aimed for, by working hard in post-production. The audience further said how the topic we chose to produce a film on was, 'quite groundbreaking.' Dyslexia was an idea that we really wanted to explore, because much like the audience said, it was a topic that hasn't really been produced in film much before, which meant we had many different perspectives and styles that we could have chosen.

In terms of weakness though the audience thought that in some of the scenes where the main character sits at the desk frustrated, there perhaps were, 'one or two shots too many in those scenes.' This perhaps left the audience a little disinterested because there were too many shots trying to fill space, as opposed to making a point and then moving on. We did try and aim to eek out as much emotion of the scenes as possible, but it may have been overdone too much and meant the audience lost emotional investment in those scenes, having the opposite effect to what we aimed for. In terms of improving this we would have taken some of the close ups out and perhaps added in some track shots which revolve around the main character.

Fitness for purpose, client

In terms of meeting the brief, its requirements specified that we must produce a, '5-10 min' short film, with groups, 'no larger than 3' using only a, 'single camera production.' Within my group, we did carry out all of these requirements, as the group size was 2 and our short film was 6:30. The brief was less specific on the creative ideas, behind the short film all that it specified was that it had to remain within only one genre. In terms of filmmakers, this meant that we had no limits to how creative we wanted to become. The brief allowed us to think about very different ideas, in which we could encapsulate a whole topic whilst remaining close to a very specific theme/style. This is what we really aimed to do and felt we were more successful with, is the style that we wished to emulate and the ingenuity of the topic. 

However in terms of a weakness, we initially did not meet the brief as our film did contain some copyrighted music, which featured in 2 scenes. However we was able to rectify this and change the music after quickly noticing. This meant that we needed to make a revision in our short film to once again meet the brief and be accepted. We further worked well to make the improvement and hand in another draft which fully met the brief.