Feedback

We showed our finnished version of the opening to some students in our class and asked them to give us some feedback, and some constructive criticism where neccessary. The students we showed made these points about our opening:

• The narrative is unclear.

We agreed with this, and knew that this would be a problem after editing. We took all of the shots thinking that when they were put together they would make much more sense than they actually did, this matter was also not helped by the fact that there were certain shots in the animatic that for unforseen reasons we could not film in the time we had. But if we had shot them, they may have helped distinguish certain aspects of our story.

• There is a continuity error when the photograph is lit on fire inside, and then thrown on a fire outside.

Again this problem arose whilst we were filming, in that we couldnt get the lighter to work outside so had to make the decision that we would light it inside and then re light it outside on the main fire then film it being thrown in. We tried our best to make it as unobvious it was two different locations as possible but certain things are noticabley different.

To avoid these problems next time we would have taken much more time to film the entire thing, possibly over the course of a few days rather than leaving the filming as late as we did and only having one day to film. This way there would be more chance of us having the weather neccessary for certain parts, and we would also have had much more chance of filming shots we didnt have time for that would have helped our narrative.

I would also like to apologise on the lateness of uploading our finnished opening. But as we have had trouble with the soundtrack and with uploading in general it has taken much longer than expected, it should be up by the end of friday though.

Soundtrack issues

Our original soundtrack was composed by phillip glass which we later found out that it wasn't copyright free, so Dr Clifflands gave us a CD full of copyright free music which we are currently editing to make it fit our thriller opening. This has greatly delayed our work on our evaluation and we will hopefully be back on track after one more lesson. While half our team are editing the soundtrack the other half will be trying to carry on with the evaluation.

Editing

After filming our thriller we have now come to editing. whilst we were filming each time we took a shot we needed we filmed it three times so to give us variety in shots and also helped when we found that some shots were either not what we wanted or were filmed with continuity errors. putting together our final piece was very little hassle apart from at one point the mac we were using sent all of our work to the recycle bin. Luckily we found it and were able to rescue it and continue editing. Our final problem occurred when we went to put a production company logo we made onto our piece in final cut, the lettering was unreadable. But we overcame this buy editing the words we needed over the top of the image on final cut the same way we put the credits on.

Corrected risk assessments

The previous risk assessments we uploaded were unfortunately incorrect. They were written out when one of our members, who had the completed storyboard, was away from college. So without knowing, the risk assessments were filled in and some large risks were missed out as we were not to know that they would be included in the story. Now we have reviewed the finished storyboard we were able to re-do our risk assessments this time including all of the major risks missed out previously. 

Here are the finished and correct risk assessments.

Completed Animatic

Animatic

Latest Updates

At the present time, we have completed all of the necessary work including the risk assessment and we are waiting for it to be scanned in. Other than that we are on track to get straight to the filming just in time for our fourth member to be back in college and in the thriller. Until then we will plan our scenes and select an appropriate location for filming.

Problems

Two of our members have been unable to participate due to illness, this has caused a great delay on the work produced by the group, the two members that are ill have taken work home from the group and we cannot progress without this work completed and uploaded to the blog. Until then we will be completing the risk assessment and searching for non-copyright music files to act as a soundtrack in the opening scenes of our thriller. We hope that by spending the extra time looking for a good soundtrack we will create a lot of suspense and tension. We will have reduced filming time as we know that one group member will be unable to participate for the next two weeks, his role of Director is of great importance and will have to be replaced by a substitute group member.