Nina Rose - Evaluation

My groups 2 minute film sequence is about a girl starting a new college and how she makes friends. Although this was not our original idea as we had planned to make it more about the cliché of the stereotypical groups you get in a college. This idea failed because of production difficulties as could not get a wide enough variety of people to be in our film.

Instead we decided to make our film more in the style of “Mean Girls” (Mark Waters, 2004). The genre of this film is a Chick Flick but one that is not only about teenage girls but also involves a boy. In our film it is solely about a group of girls becoming friends and the problems they face in their everyday life.

I think that because we changed our idea last minute meant we had a lack of planning, which meant we ended up very behind schedule and meant we had less time to spend on filming and editing.

Also in our group we didn’t really assign specific roles to each person until we had almost finished and had all done little bits of everything. When we did assign roles I was the editor, I think I could have improved by cutting some of the beginning panning shots of the college as I think they went on too long and the feedback we got said that they got boring. Also I think we should have had a larger range of shots to cut to and make the start faster paced and it would have also shown a lot more of the college and set the scene better.

I think the voice over introducing the main characters worked well as it explained the role of each character and what they were like. Each character also had a prop to help explain their character but I think we should have drawn more attention to each item by having some close ups of them being used as not only would it have looked better but it would have also helped with the pace as I think our film moved too slowly.

I think our film sequence did capture the right genre that we wanted, as the feedback we got from people said it had a “Mean Girls” (Mark Waters, 2004) and “Skins” feel to it which is what we were aiming for. I think if it had been slightly faster paced and we had actually managed to put our music on it would have been very similar.

However I think there were a lot of improvements we could have made, but as none of our group had much experience with “Finalcut” it meant we couldn’t do a lot of what we had planned and would have liked to do when editing as we didn’t know how. For example, when we introduced each character we had originally planned to have a freeze frame of the character then rewind it slowly and then speed it up and move onto the next scene, but we ran out of time to find out how to do this.

One major factor that really let us down was that we didn’t manage to put any music onto our film sequence which resulted in several long silent boring pauses in sound during our film. Also if we had managed to put music onto it it would have helped create a better atmosphere for each different scene and add to tension in certain places.