Film Extract Evaluation

The film extract we made is on the theme of supernatural, and having super human powers. The clip we film is at the end of the film and shows one of these supernatural characters, that has been captured, being questioned then him escaping. We titled the film- The Escapist because of his strong ability to get out of sticky situations. We had to change the end of our sequence since one member of the group was absent on the last day of filming.

The role I have taken in the process is editor and actor. During filming I was one 3 actors playing the main detective. It was hard to find a film that be part of the influence but I think ‘Watchmen’ (2009) would be suitable. Just in like any supernatural film the character usually has a double identity, one with super powers and one as a public citizen. Watchmen doesn’t include this because of the obvious appearance of some of the characters. Our film relates to this since our ‘supernatural’ character doesn’t try to hide the fact that he ‘alien’ to other people and uses his powers to help him in awkward situations.

We all contributed our ideas on how we could improve shooting and what would be good camera angles to use. One shot used is a high angle from the corner of the room. This was to try make it look like a security camera watching them walk in.
Due to my acting skills being at a low standard I had trouble remembering any number of lines how long or short and this noticeable in one shot. We did many about 3 takes of each shot to make sure we got the one or how we wanted it.
The soundtrack created by another member of the group has a ambient feel at the beginning set as the background music to give more of a super natural feel to the clip.

My main role in the making was motion editing and partly editing the sound to fit the rest of the footage. I am confident in working on this task and I’m pleased with the final outcome. I started off by editing out the important parts of the footage and fitting them together. I noticed that some of the shot were way too long but I could not cut them any shorter so needed something to go in the middle. So I took the finger tapping, which was only going to go in one part of the sequence and placed in between all the clips that were too long leading up to entering the room then took the sound from it and carried that throughout the first half of the sequence. Feedback has told me that although the tapping was good there were one or two parts where the motion of the tap was out of time with the sound. Making a smooth transition between shot also came to difficulty but I think I covered this up more by making sure there was a continuity flow and made sense. I also faded in and out the sound clips so there was a sudden jolt which would have been very obvious. Using sound bridges in some shots helped to move the slower parts along quicker. We imported music from Garage Band which James created, to be used as the opening soundtrack. The type of editing I needed to use to help the storyline make sense was parallel editing. So we could see the detectives coming up the stairs as the same time The Escapist was tapping his finger, then both lines met as the detectives walked into the room where he was being held. Once getting to the end of editing we realise there was no reactions shot of the detectives while in the interrogation scene. The only thing that I could find was a shot of the second detective standing behind, with the head of the main detective in shot. This should have been thought about while in the planning stages and making the storyline/storyboard.
One big thing that was needed to be done was cutting down of the script. It started off as 2 or 3 pages and we decided as a group it was way too long to remember and would of also drag the extract out to about 7 minutes.
If this was to be done again I would think more carefully all the way through all the stages, Including storyboarding and preparation. In my section, editing, I would plan what I was going to with each time period I had and in advance think more in depth about the transitions, how each shot would fit together in a smooth way and keep in mind not to completely concentrate on motion editing that sound also plays a big part.