Evaluation (Final) Edit

Dust - Evaluation Edit from Tom Mallinson on Vimeo.

Evaluation: Task 4

Who are your audience & what have you learned from your audience feedback?

The intended outcome for our production was to create a gritty, atmospheric trailer for a post-apocalyptic thriller, which I think we achieved. This is because of the use of action involved as well as some drama elements, creating emotional interest and depth. The target audience for our production ‘Dust’ would typically be male, around the age of 20-45 years old. This is due to the fact that it is more serious than a 'guns blazing' action film and isn’t your everyday comedy film, which a younger, male audience may be more interested in. The social class would also be more educated and middle class as some of the concepts and themes of the film would encourage intellectual engagement:It would make the audience think about society today and how threats to our survival, such as the risk of nuclear attack, are increasing. 

Due to the emotional content in the production; shown through the use of the photo of the child and the voiceover from Tom, explaining about how his family is missing, it has audience appeal to females as well. However, due to it being a 'gritty' film, it would probably appeal more to older females aged 25-45 as it isn’t a romantic comedy which is the usual target audience for ages under 25. We do think it would still appeal more to males than females due to the violence and the idea that the protagonists are being hunted, adding strong thriller elements to it.

Our likely BBFC rating for our production would be a 15. This is because our film involves gritty realism, violence and some swearing which wouldn't be appropriate for a younger audience. However, not having an 18 certificate opens up the film to a larger audience on its release date. On that note, this would be major film release on an estimated 350 screens within the first week of its UK debut. This is because our film is supported by the same institutions as The Book of Eli (385 screens) and Terminator Salvation (389 screens). The fact that our film would be made by a renowned  Hollywood director which in our case is our friend Daniel Devine (who we are potraying as an already famous director), it would increase the likelihood of our film getting wide release as people would expect high things and a great film from him.However, other directors who would likely do this sort of production are the Hughes Brothers who have had experience doing The Book of Eli which was a dystopian post apocalyptic film that did well review and profit wise. Another director who would do an excellent job is George Miller, who has done the Mad Max trilogy which, once again are very well acclaimed along with him doing a new one coming out in 2014.

We asked our media class as well as some of our friends and family for feedback on our production to gain some qualitative data. The feedback which we received was extremely valuable and helped our production become what it is now by people offering constructive criticism as well as having extra vigilance on any mistakes or errors within our editing. Thanks to this feedback we added more effects onto our production such as the chroma key and colour correction to eliminate the bright blue sky and make the whole production seem darker, dirtier and more desolate.

We also received a lot of praise and positive comments about our production from these responses. We were complimented on the use and variety of camera angles which creatively helped create appropriate meaning such as the low angle mid shot showing Curt in the office. The low angle gives off the impression that he is dominant compared to the shot before which was a high angle of Max connoting that he is weaker. We were also complemented on the use of our music with comments saying it created a sombre, serious and dramatic mood that helped establish the genre and mood that we were aiming for with our trailer. This pleased us as we had put thought and effort into finding the right 'score', contacting the band “If These Trees Could Talk” for permission to use their song. We also included a bible quote at the beginning of our trailer also which a lot of people felt deepened the impact and added weight to the trailer, though some thought it was rather clichéd, as religion as a concept is overdone in a lot of post-apocalyptic films.

We also collected some quantitative data from 20 people asking them what genre they believed our production was. The results showed that the majority immediately recognized that our production was mainly set in a Post-Apocalyptic society whilst the other results show that our production also has influences from other genres making the genre hybrid. We believe that this is due to the appropriate and creative use of mise-en-scene of our production, for example, desolate locations and dirty/ruined clothes as well as the fast paced editing, montage scenes and the obvious connotations of violence from the replica rifle among other things. The drama aspect of the production would probably be due to Tom's family and trying to find them or at least uncover what's happened to them. This information received was very useful during our production as it allowed us to revise and reinforce certain aspects of our film.

Over the past two years, I have acquired many new useful skills and techniques in regard to to filming and creating my productions. From my initial skills at the start of 2011, I have honed my knowledge and dexterity with practical equipment and learnt how to apply different skills in certain areas as I adapted them to appropriate areas. 
A major improvement, for me, came with my new learnt ability of how to use Pinnacle Studios HD15, which is the editing software we use within Media Studies at BRGS. I can assert that my burgeoning aptitude with editing software bolstered the success of my productions overall, as I have learnt how to perform advanced techniques from editing clips up to 1/24 to mastering J and L cuts. I have also learnt how to apply edits to my footage such as colour correction and chroma key to block out some colours and to add a greyscale/ pallid blue tint to the production, giving it a more apocalyptic ambience. 
When I first started using Pinnacle, I couldn’t use many of the editing tools and struggled to add sound files and edit down the clips to fit into the production. However, now I can do all of these with ease, as well as being able to find new tools such as the slice tool to cut clips up in half, move and place them in different places to create a montage effect on the production, which worked well to create fluidity and diversity. I have also grown accustomed to using a variety of different transitions when I try to split up scenes or show an ellipsis of time. For example, during the production of Dust, we added a fade to black, dissolve and erode transition so that it matches the scene at hand and make the trailer seem more fluid. The erode effect worked especially well as it matched the fire in the next scene making it look like the last scene was being burnt away.

When I first filmed my preliminary production in 2012, I was an absolute novice when it came to   using the camera as I felt perplexed by the sheer amount, though trivial compared to higher tech cams, of settings on the camera, such as changing the iris to make the image darker. Setting up the camera and tripod as well proved troublesome as it took a while to make sure that the camera was perfectly balanced and was the correct height to get a variety of different shots and angles, whilst trying to figure out which shot would suit our production the best. Much of the filming was up to me during the AS course which, although tricky to begin with, gave me the motivation to progress my skills in this department of media production. The same applied to my experience with editing software. Although I grasped the basics quickly, I found that more advanced editing styles were quite complex for an absolute beginner. However, although I wasn't the most integral component of the editing process during AS, I performed what skill I had in the final half of the production which, I believe, allowed me to grow more confident with the software and therefore flourish in later tasks. Now I have had the opportunity to use a diverse range of camera technologies through AS and during the summer, I can assert that I have the ability to control the camera proficiently, along with the tripod, to create a variety of well composed shots with angles appropriate to the demands any task in accompaniment with my greater understanding of editing techniques which I incorporated a lot during this course. 

For instance, during this production, I, along with my group, immediately set about filming and constructing ideas involving some advanced techniques, from framing to settings, as we had developed an aptitude with the cameras over the AS course. My camera skills in particular, I find, have progressed tenfold this year as I had fundamental role in the filming. This year I intended to step it up a notch by incorporating a neat blend of extreme close ups, close ups, medium shots and long shots with various angles (from high to low, to narrow to wide) for desired effect; i.e. high angled shots were implemented during scenes where the survivors ( myself and Max) were blatantly in the midst of peril, accentuating our helplessness and/or the adversity weighted against us, whilst low angle shots used in the scene with Curtis in the office demonstrated my ability to make a subject appear dominant, with more authority and prowess (complemented by the darkness settings which evoke a sense of foreboding).

As a far more active component of a group, I also honed my skills with Adobe Photoshop CS3 as I created the production poster from a captured frame in the production and then transformed it, to the best of my ability within time constraints, into a genuine looking poster for distribution, modified to bleed the ambience of the film. I also found myself exploring completely new areas of media production where I contributed to the design of our poster - mostly concentrating on text, music and formatting where the rest of the group performed other tasks. 

I am proud to say I have made vast improvements with my editing skills as I had to adapt skills I had acquired in AS around a completely new task and then subsequently develop upon them from there. For example, I have definitely grown more competent in regard to using the advanced video editing features; special effects including chroma key and colour correction in post production were used especially, when I toned down bright primary colours, or completely ablated them, in order to make locations look more post apocalyptic (an improvement needed from our first draft edit of the trailer). This meant naturally occurring colours such as greens of foliage and grassland and blues of a clear sky could be removed and replaced with drearier, sallow coloured foliage and bleaker, dark grey skies appropriate for the ubiquitous conception of what a post apocalypse would look like. I also found myself exploring, and therefore becoming more and more capable, with transition edits. This included the development of the static transition which is prevalent in the trailer. Although initially difficult to create to the point we were close to scrapping the idea, I found that exploring and modifying the simpler settings could make static transitions work: we downloaded copyright commons static, but then had to animate it which I ended up doing through using Blur effects and screen modification in conjunction with Key Frames, which I used to frame each differing static pattern in shot that, when played, made an excellent oscillating distortion effect. Another way I reinforced the post-apocalyptic feel whilst also exploring realms of editing I hadnt done in AS, was with the 'erode' transition, which resembled a piece of film burning away over the scene with Tom in front of the fire, and hence had relation to the shot in addition to symbolism of fire. I also found it interestingly similar to our chosen font for the title, Dust, in the way it appears to spread unchecked, like the physical decay or abstract misery a nuclear war would bring. 

In addition, I developed my skill with sound, particularly the soundtrack where I utilised a track but chopped it up and placed segments of the song where we wanted it. I also experimented with layering sounds on top of the soundtrack, for instance, the thunder sound over the bible quote, and the beginning of 'Malabar Front' by If These Trees Could Talk  which features unstable wind and chilling screams which work well to set up the introduction of the trailer, or the point where the melancholic guitars of the song meld with the voiceover ( my voiceover in this example) but then subside slightly as the roaring sound of a helicopter dominates the section of the trailer.

Evaluation Task 3