Over all Evaluation

This is our completed film. In the grand scheme of things, I'm quite pleased with the outcome of this film and I think that it does reach out to the target audience we were hoping that our film would appeal to.

Most of all whilst making this film opening, I have learned how important continuity is, as even little mistakes can make your film seem amateurish and also rushed. We do have a few continuity mistakes in our film, how obvious they are to people who have not seen it before, I am not sure, but if i were to make a project like this again then I would make sure I am very careful about making sure there are no continuity mistakes.

When looking back at our preliminary task, the improvements are obvious, with the fluency of the editing, the scripting and also the filming.

I'm really glad that we had our animatics to help us at the beginning as they really helped us when it came to planning and also seeing if what we wanted to do would work when put together in the film. However, we didn't stick completely to the original plan, we mostly have and it's helped to have it when editing.


Looking back on our film whilst writing the director's commentary, we realised that we could have shown Anisha's love for Dan more apparent and more interesting, perhaps by talking about how wonderful he is in the narration or making it more apparent through the chemistry between them. This would have really made it a rom-com opening and now that we have finished, I'm disappointed that we didn't think about it before hand.

Directors Commentary

To record our directors commentary we used an ediroll. At first we weren't too sure about using it because our previous experiences with using one hadn't been positive. However when we came round to editing them we found that the quality was clearer than we thought it would be so this was good.

After we had watched a few real commentaries, we began to sit and watch our finished film and write a script about what we chose to do in our film and why we did it. We then had to record this, and to make organisation easier because we did not have much time, we made sure we wrote each track number next to the section we had recorded. This helped a lot when editing our commentary because it meant that we didn't have to keep listening to every track over and over again until we found the right one.

Editing this was hard as we had to chose when to freeze the film to make sure what we were saying fits in with what's happening in the film. Also, recording this makes you concious of how clearly you are saying words, and on more than one occasion we had to re record parts because it wasn't clear or fluent enough.

Music and Voice over

The music and voice over in our film are probably two of the most important factors.

The voice over in particular because it gives our film personality, enables you to feel more in touch with the main character and also to get a real sense of involvement, you feel as if you know her, because you're hearing her thoughts.

At first, we recorded the voice over on an ediroll, but when we came to adding it to our film, we found that it was far too quiet as the ediroll hadn't really picked up Rani's voice well enough. Instead we ended up using the camera and dragging the film into the "sound" bar rather than the image bar as it only plays the sound out and doesn't make the footage of Rani speaking come up over the top of the footage we want in our film.

Later on we re-recorded some of the voice over as someone pointed out that it was sometimes hard to understand what Rani said as she speaks quite quickly sometimes. This was useful feed back and I was pleased that we'd finished filming so far in advance because it gave us time to really refine what we were editing.

For the music, we were unable to find any un copyrighted music on the internet that really fit in with our film so in the end we recorded our friend playing her guitar. We asked her to watch the film so far and play what she thought would fit, as long as it was up beat and sort of in the folk/alternate genre. I thought that the music she came up with really worked well and added a nice atmosphere to the film.

Filming 2

When we re shot some of the walking scenes it was important for us that we chose a day when the weather was similar to how it was when we filmed our first lot of footage. This was important for continuity reasons. I think that we managed to get a similar day, so the continuity wasn't ruined.

When we went out during lesson time to film these shots, we had to decide quickly if we wanted to go back to the place where we originally filmed the walking shots, or if it didn't really matter because our character Anisha was walking somewhere anyway, so it was probably more important that the scenery wasn't too similar to make it look like she had changed location. When filming the close up shot of Anisha walking towards the camera, it was quite difficult to film because we had to walk backwards as quickly as she was walking and also try and keep the camera steady so that the footage wasn't all bumpy. After a few retakes I think that this shot worked quite well because it explores new points of view for the audience, allowing them to still follow the character, whilst still being able to understand her emotions.

Editing

After we finished filming we made a start on putting our footage together in order to make sure that our opening made sense to the audience and hopefully keeps them interested enough to watch the rest of the film, had we have made the rest of it.

The first problem that we encountered whilst editing was that when uploading the footage, it sometimes froze and we would have to start from the beginning and re upload our footage again. Unfortunately this meant that all of our footage is not in one folder in order, but in several, which made finding our footage when we needed to edit more time consuming than it needed to be.

We also found that editing can become quite tedious, especially when you're trying to cut a clip to make the match-on-action shots perfect, you begin to become sick of your film because you keep having to watch the same part over and over again. It is especially annoying when you realise that you have to re shoot a whole scene. There is a small part in our film where we needed to use two different takes of the same shot, we tried to edit this as best we could to avoid it looking like this is what we did, but unfortunately Anisha's pose was too different in each shot so we ended up having to use a transition here instead. Although the transition does smooth the jog out, I think that it looks a bit weird and would have been more happy with re-filming that part again.

Editing the main titles proved to be quite hard, as to make them as exciting as we could, we wanted them to come up word-by-word as Anisha said the name of our film. This meant that we had to be so so accurate to make sure each word came up on time. We then cut from the real life footage and onto a picture which is of a paisley pattern, but we kept the name of the film up. At first we couldn't really see the titles against the background, so we experimented with different colour glows around the font. In the end we stuck with black, but only had the glow on all three words as soon as the last word "Guru" was said, this unintentionally, but also luckily created emphasis on the title as it makes it seem like it is slightly jumping out at you. As well as these titles, like many rom-coms, we have the names of the main actors and main production team coming up over the top of the opening footage. For the names of the production team we used our own names, even though we didn't really do those jobs, we just wanted our names in the titles as not all of us had leading roles. We kept the font white and simple as this is a convention of a romantic comedy film.

Another tricky part was making sure our voice over was in the right place as otherwise the film would not make sense. We also had to make sure that the volume was loud enough. I'm glad we chose to use a voice over as it makes the film almost like a diary to Anisha, and gets the audience more involved, especially when she talks to them. As well as the voice over, we also had to get the music in the right place. We were a bit silly and didn't really take into account how much music we would actually need, and as it turned out, we only just had enough for what we used it for. We kept having to move that about as well every time we changed the footage to make sure that it still started, stopped and was at the right volume in the right places.

During the flashbacks that Anisha has at the beginning of this film we were a bit worried that it wasn't really obvious that it was a flashback and could confuse the audience, so we looked through the different effects that we could use to make it more obvious. The only one that we found that was appropriate was a glow effect which added a nice glow around the outside of the shot. Unfortunately, the effect was not compatible with the pinicle package that we were using, so we were unable to add an effect to this part of our film. I hope that the fact that Anisha is wearing a different outfit every time a new situation happens shows the audience that she is looking back, also that it then returns to her as before.

Continuity was one of the main factors we had to work on during editing. We were able to film on days with similar weather so that did not present us with much trouble apart from putting us slightly behind schedule. We noticed that during the scene where Anisha is being embarrassed by her sisters that at one point Amina has no glasses on, and the next she did not. We did not have time to re-shoot this part again, but it has made us more aware of how careful we have to be when filming.