Post Production Preliminary Evaluation

When we were editing the preliminary activity we found that the speech during the dialogue was inaudible and the wind noise in the other shots made it sound unprofessional. I then decided to remove the raw audio from the video and replace it with a tense, pacey drum track I recorded myself. For the conversation part, I decided to re-dub the audio by recording the exchanges again later in the editing studio using a microphone. This meant the audio was clear and high quality but, we had trouble syncing the audio with the speech. This was what most of our time editing was composed of. When we did this and played it back to ourselves after uploading it to YouTube, we found the final exchange to be far louder than all the others. We put this down to the voice actor holding the microphone too close to his face. This should be avoidable in the main task because we now know the affect it can have on the audio. Furthermore, we plan to stay away from dialogue in general.

Any further problems were avoided due to the use of our storyboard. This meant we had a clear image in each of our heads of what we wanted to do. This meant we filmed quickly and easily, and had time to try new shots and perfect current ones. This is a lesson we will definitely take to our main thriller because it helped us significantly in the prelim task.

Overall the prelim was definitely a useful task to do because we learned how to use our cameras and editing software. This will give us one less hurdle to jump in the main task and allow us more time for blogging and any re-shoots we need to do.  In terms of editing we learned how to do basic cuts and fades. We also learned how to use effects and change them to suit. We also learned what looks good on an actual film. We also learnt about how different length of take gives a different feel to a scene and how to make the audience differentiate between real time and reel time.

We have had positive feedback from many peers and both our teachers. One teacher, upon first seeing it described it as “epic”. However many people did comment on the aforementioned loudness of the final exchange of dialogue.

The final preliminary we had did not match the image we had in our head. This was mainly because we filmed in a different location to where we wanted to at first. This actually turned out to be an advantage due to the better lighting conditions and cleaner look of the place we finally settled on so we figured it was for the better. We also added in a quick establishing shot of a CCTV camera to make it clear to the audience we were filming from the perspective of a surveillance camera, due to audience feedback.

By Bart Lang