Evaluation

For 'Night Journey' we went along the lines of portraying our business man character as paranoid schizophrenic that is making his way to Amsterdam on a train for reasons unknown however on his way encounters a passenger which he believes is a cannibal. We used the voiceover to drive the narrative forward, from how the dialogue plays out its clear this has happened in the past due to his use of tenses. To illustrate how the business man has fabricated the fellow passenger we used single frame cutting techniques in 'Final Cut Pro', once the man is seated we see him gazing at the seat opposite him we then placed a single over exposed frame between this shot and the next to create a sequence that suggests the cannibal has appeared before him in an abrupt manor. We had sure to cut the appearing shot as he removes his cigarette and puffs out smoke to generate an idea of his enigmatic persona. When constructing the rough cut we made continuity a key aspect and so didn't adjust and shots until it played out without any obvious mistakes, I felt that cutting to the exterior shots of the passing train they had boarded could aid us in retaining continuity as it disguises the characters movements as well as the mise en scene such as his jacket and news paper. The use of the over exposed shot to move the characters was done twice, on the second occasion we used it to remove both characters from the coach suggesting that the cannibal had taken the worried passenger somewhere other than the train, after some exterior cutaways were used we bough the characters back into the coach, we utilised the cutaways to show a digression of time. The narrative follows a curve that takes the passengers from day time through to night and then back to early morning, to advocate this lapse in time we cutaway to the exterior tracks we used the lighter ones in the daytime the darker ones at night and the same more luminous footage to signify the early morning at which point the cannibal departs from the train leaving the business man confused. Though the narrative follows the idea this man could possibly be insane its also indicative of the fact the man cannot sleep the use of the cannibal illustrates his inability to fall asleep this could be due to an outside issue that we haven't chosen to explain. Another technique we chose to display a progression in time is a cross fade, we placed it between the out of window shot and the shot that pictures the passing city lights, prior to this fade we had to change the playback motion of the lighter more rural landscape shot to reverse so that it matched the city scape shot direction, this change indirection also helped solve the issue of the previous shot that shows the train passing in an alternate direction. To justify the idea that the man cannot sleep on this journey we made sure the initial shots of the passenger show him in a fairly awake state of mind contrasting these with the later shots where the man looks stressed and fatigued. We incorporated the city footage of Amsterdam as part of his dream like state, to trigger this phase in the narrative we cross faded the pan to the window to the forward tracking utopian atmosphere of the city, the panning motion and the fast tracking movement work well together showing he is slowly drifting off into his dream. As the cross fade takes us from train to city we felt that fading the atmos out would work well to display his escape from the man he is in fear of, however we did use a small amount of dialogue at this point which helps to disrupt his dream throwing him back into reality. We implemented the CU shot of the man gripping his newspaper suggesting he is experiencing a nightmarish turn to his dream this fear then unfolds as we cut to a shot of the mans mouth, its clear at this point the man is intent on devouring him or so he believes. Though there is dialogue throughout the film we kept the lines short and fragmented as well as long pauses in speech allow us to understand the uncomfortable position the business man has found himself. To keep an interesting pace as the film progresses we have used cutaways to the railway tracks or footage of the passing train complimented by loud audio tracks, we felt these abrupt cuts help keep the audience focuses with out loosing interest. In the final stages of the film we encounter a CU shot of the worried mans eye line along side this shot we added a reversed atmos track to create an ambiguous sense of realisation of what he has just encountered. In terms how we constructed the soundscape for this film we set out to keep the dialogue always dominant by lowering the atmos tracks using key frames in the centre waveform box, however we experienced difficulty during this stage as the key frames we had designated wouldn't apply to the track in our timeline, we resolved this issue by using the blade tool to cut where we would fade the track down and then adjusted the mix using audio mixer in the tools menu, after finding the correct level for the atmos we placed audio fades either side of the sliced track as a way to graciously fade in and out without a noticeable difference.

After watching the documentary we were given in its complete form I felt that there were some problems with it as a whole and so before we constructed our own version of the documentary I made sure that we would avoid these problematic choices that they had made. In particular the typical bedroom footage that seems to appear in most student films, this was to be avoided as we felt it didn't bring anything to the documentary especially in one that is to be four and a half minutes in total run time. We decided to divide the film into sections of interview footage, this would be the basis of our piece and in between these scenes we would include tonal montages to establish a pace rather than loosing the audience in monotonous interview dialogue. We structured a short montage to introduce the character rather than starting with dialogue, so that people could grasp a brief insight as to what to expect in the later stages of the film, the montage was comprised of the most interesting and dynamic shots. This montage and the ones seen later in the film were purposely cut on the beat of the music much like a music video we felt this aspect worked well because the viewers will actively engage in what they are seeing due to it being pleasing to experience. We chose two different music tracks both of which fit into the genre of dubstep, drum and bass, and electronic. The pace of the tracks aided us in constructing an interesting energetic progression of narrative, the later song was used in the montage that shows the struggle of the character as he braves the cold in order to navigate a difficult rock formation. To indicate his struggle to overcome this difficult section we cut together the footage of him falling off the rock face along with his expressions suggesting he is failing, underneath the visuals depicting this mood we introduced the harmonious start to the second track, we then key framed the music so that the first more spirited note plays out at a noticeably higher volume on this key frame we then started to introduce footage of him utilising more progressive manoeuvres finishing off with him achieving his end result which was getting to the top of the rock. We took it upon ourselves to explain how the climber actually feels rather than making a documentary about climbing, to advocate this we started one of the scenes with the quote “fucking agony” it comes as unexpected turn in the film however keeps the viewer interested and involved, to exaggerate this statement we raised the volume to a more prominent level. Due to the tracks being downloaded from the internet despite their copyright free state they were in fact in the format of mp3 which was applicable when constructing the rough cut however when we came to tidying up the clips we decided to convert the mp3 to an uncompressed wav format thus giving us a more complete looking timeline. To retain the constant continuity throughout the documentary we had placed our renamed footage and dispensed them in bins, each one sub categorised the footage into what the weather was like allowing us to clearly see which clips we could and couldn't use indifferent stages of the film. We decided to end the film with the same way it started and so we chose clips that looked back on the sequences we had seen, a CU of the contributors face was used to gain a slight emotional connection especially one of him smiling showing that he has managed to climb successfully despite the harsh weather conditions completing the emotional arc ending on high spirits.

When it came to structuring 'Out O Date' I tended to follow the script quite closely as I noticed that some the footage was already problematic in terms of character positioning, therefore I only decided to cut out shots rather than making it more difficult. For the first scene I tried to construct the film as it plays out in the script however I chose not to use the establishing crane shot to introduce the characters, instead I went with the mid shot that points the characters in the direction of the audience which I feel makes for a more exciting gag as the words themselves which are spelt wrong aren't the most important idea in the film I felt the characters conversation was more of an entertaining subject to focus on. I chose to cut to 'Tony' as his character will be short lived in the piece and so I decided to utilise his most interesting dialogue and movement which was in fact removing the tights from around his head and looking whimsical, cutting to 'Tony' also helped to break up the mid shot before it was on for too long. In this scene there was a distracting car noise present, to tackle this issue I drew out the shot so that the audience could hear the car enter and disappear this made the cut to the adjacent reverse shoulder shot more fluid as there wasn't a jump in audio level. The problematic shot that introduces the female character 'Jane' was avoided by adding in the second angle of 'Alf' walking towards her briskly, though I do feel the following shoulder shot of 'Jane's' interaction with 'Alf' is rather snappy as she doesn't enter the frame nor have any movement I feel that this was unavoidable. This character positioning followed through to the next scene I constructed to make the piece feel less jumpy I drew out certain shots to make the character positioning in the next shot realistically achievable. My primary aim for the sequences was to make them play out naturally so that the audience could focus on the gags rather than being visually disrupted. Though there was a dilemma visually I found that the audio only need a couple fades to make it play out smoothly, the gaps in the dialogue allowed me to simply cut between without any real difficulty.