James's Evaulation

Film studies evaluation

My role in the production of this short scene was the editor so I had the job of choosing the scenes we wanted and cutting them into the film that we wanted. One of the main problems I had with the editing was the fact we didn’t have the right tripod when we went to go film so all of the shots are a little shaky so that made editing a little more difficult making sure they didn’t suddenly swap from position. Another thing the editor has to do is build up tension with the use of shots and the soundtrack can also help with this pace and tension building by having slow edgy music for tension music with some clever shots that build tension.

The short scene from a film we made up is a kind of teen vigilante film, it is centred on a teen whose school is overrun with crime and violence and he vows to tidy up the school by first dealing with the bullies there before moving onto the bigger problems.

The scene opens with a medium shot of the main character walking up an alley way to a cash machine so he can withdraw some money out but as he standing there two people catch his eye and he knows them as two of the bullies from the school so he assumes they have been sent as orders from higher up to take care of him as they are both pointing at him and cracking their knuckles as if they were looking for a fight. So the main character walks off hoping they will follow him so he can exact out some punishment. This is meant to twist the audience’s expectations as they should think that the main character would get beaten up.

One of my favourite bits to edit was the cash machine scene where the main character sees the two bullies and it quickly cuts back and forth between them and the central character. The main part of this shot reverse shot bit is to build up suspense and to make the audience think something is going to happen. There was one small problem with this scene because we needed a close up of the two bullies sitting on the bench but we forgot to film it so I had to take another shot and zoom in just enough so you could see it was them but not enough to fully pixelate it. The original shot we had was it zoomed in and turned using a certain technique.

The technique involved putting key frames in the places where we wanted the zoom to start and where we wanted it to stop. So on the first key frame you just put the shot in it’s starting place and then in the last one you change it so it’s a different shot from the first one, we changed it so it was slightly off to the side and zoomed in on the bullies but we decided it didn’t work so that whys I just had it start off as a zoomed in shot instead of moving around.

Our short scene used to be a lot longer than it actually was because we used to have a load of walking included at the beginning of it because we were going to have a voice over during it while the main character first walks up to the cash machine but we decided as a group not to as it wouldn’t really work with it so I had to cut out the majority of the walking at the beginning.

I decided to use quite slow cutting at the beginning so the audience could get used to the scene and then I started to speed it up when he reaches the machine and then I wanted to keep it fast paced when they were following him but we didn’t have the required shots so I chose to slow it down again and then have one long shot of the place where the central character went and got followed so we could put fighting noises in there to make it sound right.

When people came round and viewed our work they said that the shaky camera made it look kind of creepy which was good because that’s what we wanted. The audience read the scene at the end where the main character goes behind a building and then the two bullies follow him, they thought that the main character would get beaten up and they found it rather comical when he just calmly walks out on his own and puts in his headphones to listen to music after dishing out his punishment.

NB: Blogger hates uploading pictures.