Feedback from our first render/edit.

The day after I finished editing the thriller opening we showed it to one of our media studies teachers. He gave some good feedback which I was thinking myself, and some more "questionable" feedback. Overall hopefully tweaking the video should make it slightly better as its always good to have a second pair of eyes on something.

One of the main bits of feedback was the title at the end of the opening sequence. I did like how the title showed up on the end, however I was curious whether it was going to look too much like a trailer than an actual film opening. After asking for some advice from my fellow group members i decided to leave it in and see if its okay. The feedback I got told me it made the thriller opening too much like a trailer so I did end up cutting it from the final edit.

Secondly I got told to change the credits in the opening. Instead of having footage behind it, have the black background with centered text like the "vector productions" title. This was the feedback I had the most mix feelings about. Before presenting this thriller opening I was so happy with myself on the editing, the way I have stabilized the footage, made fake pans which look really good, good timed cuts within the music and so on. To have to re-adjust everything for the titles was not what I originally had in mind, but I was open to the idea. Before going ahead and working on this massive change to our project I wanted to show some other people our video and get some feedback for improvements. The majority much preferred the idea of keeping the text overlapped as otherwise it doesn't remove the suspense from the footage of Jak cleaning blood,etc.

Another bit of feedback we got was that we should shorten the length of the black space from the credits to the opening scene. I fully agreed with this as something as simple as that could loose audience attention straight away. I shortened it to about 11 seconds which I personally believe is fine.

One more bit of feedback we got was that the shot of the BBC news page was too quick and they couldn't fully read it in time. We got feedback from a student in our class whom said he only just managed to read what the headline was and that was when he was focusing on just doing that. From this we realized that we needed to make the pan slower so its easier to read and make it last longer.

Finally we got told to shorten some of the scenes like Jak wiping blood off the knfie and Jak putting on the gloves. People said it was boring as it lasted too long and they got the idea within the first few seconds. I removed part of the scene where Jak is wiping blood to shorten it and that worked fine however instead of cutting the glove scene we decided to use it to include credits instead, which worked really well.

After we got all the feedback we decided to go through our thriller opening and discuss what needs changing. For this I made notes on the changes we definitely wanted and the timestamp so it was slightly easier for me to do. This was really useful as I did not have access to my computer whilst we were talking about the changes as I was at school. Also below that we discussed what roles we would have for the film. We included Ben Prunty as he asked to be credited as his music is copyrighted. I took the role of the 'editor' in the credits as I had done the editing. Jak did the screenplay so we were happy him going under that role. We gave James Everett the role of director however it was more of a team effort in my eyes as both Jak and I had helped. As you can see after the credits I noted where the text was to be placed.