Final Post

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Audience Feedback...

In today's school assembly we showed all of our film openings to the sixth form and a few year 11s from our school.
It was strange to watch our film opening on a big screen in front of other people because I feel like I have watched it so many times now that I no longer know whether it is effective or not.
We got everyone to write down some feedback about the film openings and here are five examples of what people wrote (most people were writing the same sorts of things);

1. "Liked the combination of what was happening to Leyla visually and the voice over of her mother talking to police."
2. "Music makes suspense. Writing looks good and fitting. Good cliff hanger of Charlotte (Leyla) actually waking up."
3. "Interesting. Liked the flash backs and the flashing credits. Gripping - made you want to watch on."
4. "Really good! I liked the cup and the milk! Everything was great, story was good! Gave me chills."
5. "I liked the journey through town in a car!"

All of these were positive and we were happy with the feedback we got.

Final draft of our film opening...

Here is the very last draft of our film opening 'Leyla' both in HD and not in HD (because the HD version crops a lot of our shots which changes the way we wanted our film to look)




HD Version;


I am so happy with the way our film opening turned out in the end, and after fixing the few small problems that we had with the sound it is now complete and we are all quite happy with it.

Twelfth Draft with GarageBand track...

Here is the twelfth draft of our film opening, probably the penultimate draft, due to a few small issues with the sound that we need to edit. Other than those few issues, this is pretty much the finished product!

We turned the volume of the birds down and made the fades in between sections of sound much smoother but now I think the music is too loud so we will need to turn that down too in order to be able to hear the voiceover clearly. I really love the sound of the birds when it carries on going even after the screen has gone black. We also got rid of the random shots of Charlotte that were at the end of the film opening before. Ending our film with 'Leyla' walking off down the path is much more effective.

'Kickass'

Went to the cinema at the weekend to see 'Kickass' and really enjoyed it! It is a film about a teenage boy who wants to help the world by becoming a superhero but ends up getting put in hospital a couple of times and gets in much more trouble than he expected whilst meeting some other - slightly more ruthless/violent - "superheroes" along the way. It wasn't what I expected it to be, I thought it would be thrown on the same pile as 'Superbad', 'Pineapple Express' and the like, but it was quite different in my opinion. Although some of the humour was fairly similar to that kind of film that has grown increasingly popular recently, the content was strange and not what I was expecting at all! Lots of the people that I went to see the film with said that they were quite offended by the way the 11 year old girl was portrayed in the film as she is seen swearing constantly (I can see why people were offended because she did say a word that should never be said by anyone let alone a little girl, this is shown on the clip below...), having a ridiculously extensive knowledge of weapons and even shown as an object of "lust" by the main characters' best friend. To be honest I was more offended by the fact that Nicholas Cage was in the film...
Here's a trailer for the little girl's character called Hit Girl;


There has been lots of debate about the moral issues behind the film and there are loads of different websites that have discussions about it but here is a link to one that I found quite interesting as two guys with very different opinions on the subject discuss whether or not it is right that we - as an audience - find a little girl killing everyone funny. >> click here to read the discussion <<

This man's point particularly interested me; "I don't really think this is going to spur random acts of violence, but it does have me questioning our tolerence for violence in movies, and if we should have a limit. Watching Kick-Ass made me wonder if we've passed the event horizon of mainstream depictions of graphic material. What does it say about us that we enjoy watching a little girl gleefully killing people? And does it even matter that we don't have limits? I don't
know yet."

Here is the main trailer for the film...



I really enjoyed the film and thought it was hilarious (especially when Hit Girl is running down a corridor full of bad guys killing them all whilst a very fitting song plays...) and I thought that it was questioning society about it's increasing naivety towards the influence of violence on kids rather than promoting violence, but that's just my opinion. I would definately recommend this film, and it is so interesting to see how different people react differently towards it.

Eleventh Draft - Background Music...

This is the latest draft of our film opening which has the background music on it. We decided that the film needed some music behind the voiceover, otherwise there was too much emphasis on the voices and not enough on the visual elements.
This draft sounds very rough because we recorded the track over the moving images on iMovie, rather than actually putting the GarageBand track onto the film permanently. We just did this in order to be able to have a rough draft with just the music on it.
The recording is bad quality (will be much better when we actually use the GarageBand track itself) and the fades in between different parts of the music are not as smooth as we want them to be but we can edit that to make it much better.



I particularly like the bird noises at the end when it fades to black, but for some reason the bird sounds are slightly too loud but we can edit that too.

Final Evaluation...

Here is my final evaluation of this whole section of the course. I chose to do it in a powerpoint presentation;


Molly - Media Evaluation Presentation