U-19 FILM EXTRACT: Final Evaluation (Lloyd Manning - Editor)
Monday 2 March 2009
Final Evaluation (Lloyd Manning - Editor)
Final Evaluation
In this essay I will be looking at the evaluation of my film extract that I have made in my group called 'Final Dreams' we looked at the fantasy genre and found that we gained inspiration from films like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and a darker film like ‘Donnie Darko’. I will look at the elements that help to provoke a response from the audience using the micro-elements. My role in this project was as the editor this role involves changing or ‘editing’ the shots to make them look better and also to rearranging them into the right order.
Our film extract covers the sub-genre of teen-fantasy, this changes the way that the story develops, the extract then fits into the familiar characteristics of its sub-genre. The micro-elements that this genre effects the most is the camerawork, mise-en-scene and editing. Starting with camerawork; this is effects the way that the director and cameraman may shoot the scene and which angles are taken for example using a shot like the shot below which uses the rule of thirds; this is used to make a better shot because you can divide the shot up (like the green lines)
Shot of 'Final Dreams'
The second element that is effected is mise-en-scene, what the characters wear; fantasy tends to have weird and abnormal clothing with unnatural backdrops, but with ours we started off in more normal clothing but as there is a transition near the end where our main character falls into another world and she goes from wearing coloured clothes to black and white clothing which works well because it make clear that something has happened between the two shots.
Being the editor made me take a big part in the narrative of the story because I was that put the final order of the story, which meant that I had control over that part. Probably the most effected of the elements is editing this is because you can use filters a lot more to show that something is happening. I achieved my editing using a program called 'Final Cut Express' which is a top quality program that is mainly used by amateur-pro filmers and is a great home editing software.
'Final Cut Express' Screenshot
The other members also had a big role in the development of the narrative take for example the sound; this sets a musical timeline that we then fitted the video to. So our sound man changed the narrative without really knowing it because as I edited I was fitting clip to the music which then changed the order of the footage. The soundtrack also helped to make sure that film fitted into the sub-genre by using the right soundtrack that held suspense while toying with the audience on what may happen next The cameraman developed the way that everything that was shot and so I could only make the extract with what I was given but I had a lot of footage to experiment with. I did work closely with our director to try and see if we could improve on what we had, this worked well because she gave me ideas and I then improved them with my own little twist.
Are group gave ourselves a very good and simple plan that we all followed to achieve our end target we tended to stick to what we were planning to do that lesson and there wasn't really any real problems that accord, because we worked quickly and were efficient so we finished ahead of the deadline.
I wanted the audience to want to get to know our main character and feel sorry for her at the end because she was lead into a different place where she is all alone, on all of the shots I upped the contrast; this gave a bold effect to the picture. And with our spirit character, I wanted the audience to see this person as strange and not really from this world so I added a higher contrast to the shots while darkening the brightness to make it different from our female character. I also added audio filters to the sounds, I added echo to make the movements of the male more unnatural.
The only feedback we got from the video so far was that some of our shots could have been in a different order, but we thought that they looked really good as they were but apart from this comment there wasn’t much to say about it apart from the fact it came off really well and fitted into the genre really well and left you wanting to know what happened.
Really my technical skill helped me to achieve a high standard of editing because I have worked on many other projects like this one I was able to take my knowledge from them and import that into this project. As a person I am really creative and I love to stretch my abilities and I found I could do the editing really easily there wasn’t any boundaries that I got stuck on either.
