Final Cut

This is the final cut of the opening for our film, Hidden!

Audience Feedback

In order to make sure our film opening appeals to our target audience, we conducted a test screening. We used a female majority, and most of the viewers were 16 or 17 years old, which fits in with our target audience, so we knew that their answers would be relevant. However, we did also use someone in their 50s, which we thought would help us to see if they also thought our film would appeal to our target audience, and if we'd possibly eliminated other important target audiences. Their answers, however, confirmed our thoughts that we'd correctly identified our target audience.

We asked them if they thought any improvements needed to be made. 6 people said, yes, 6 said no. The improvements were:

• to finish the scream at the end - we have now completed this
• to completely finish editing and improve continuity - this has also been done
• change the ringtone - we chose not to do this, as only one person mentioned this, and others had in fact praised the ringtone we used
• the beginning - unfortunately, this was all that they specified, so we weren't 100% sure what they meant and were therefore unable to improve it
• 2x making the lighting at the end darker - we have tried our best to do this, but unfortunately, our editing software, in the end shot, was unable to compensate for not having filmed later in the day (this was the only shot that did this though)

Everyone else felt that no improvements needed to be made, so considering this and the improvements we were asked to make, it seems that we've successfully reached our target audience.

We asked them what genre they thought our film would be, and everyone answered either thriller, horror, or a sub-genre of these (e.g. psychological thriller), so we've correctly used thriller conventions to show our chosen genre of film.

All participants also correctly identified our target audience as being teenagers ages 15+, although only two extended this to the full 24 years of age, and one person thought it would appeal to those up to 40 as well. However, this could be due to the fact that we used mainly teenagers for our test screening, so they would be unsure what people in their twenties would want to watch. In hindsight, we should've used some people in their early twenties too.

The majority of answers said that our film appeared to be an independent film rather than a blockbuster (2 said unsure, and 2 were unreadable), so it seems that we've correctly brought this across to our audience.

Also, everyone thought the name of our film (Hidden) worked well with the genre and what happened in the opening, and thought the graphics we used helped to make it more effective and more true to it's thriller genre. We can therefore see that we don't need to make any changes to this aspect of our opening.

Everybody also felt that the sound we used was appropriate and created the right atmosphere for a thriller film. They liked both the diegetic sounds (panicky, breathlessness, screaming) and non-diegetic music, which shows that this will be effective for our audience. The only problem was a little bit of editing that needed completing (as mentioned earlier), which has now been sorted.

All feedback on the use of camera shots was positive, and often stated that they fitted in well with the genre. Two particular shots that were praised were the one half-hidden behind a bush, and the end shot where Amalia runs down the path and the person holding the camera (myself) chases down after her. The only criticism was that one person thought there should've been more cross-cutting, but we don't see how we could've done this without changing the plot of our opening, which ourselves and our audience liked.

The majority also said that they would watch our film (only a couple said they wouldn't, but that was only because they don't like scary films), which proves that our film opening is effective in grabbing the attention of the correct target audience. We appear to have been accurate in making our film appeal to the audience we wanted, and we are now confident that our film would be successful in the real world.

Example Of My Editing Skills 3

This is an example of my editing skills with diegetic and non-diegetic sound. The line of pictures at the top is the actual images displaying on screen, the blocks below that are diegetic sound, and the blocks at the bottom are non-diegetic sound. Specifically, I sorted out a problem with the non-diegetic sound, this being that we wanted to use two different music soundtracks, which had a different tempo and timbre to them. I found an appropriate place in both pieces of music to cut them so that the change, whilst obvious that there was a change in music, sounded more natural than had done previously, and didn't have a gap between them, which would ruin the tension we were trying to create. I also timed the second piece of music to Amalia's facial expression changing, though this can't be seen from this shot.

Example Of My Editing Skills 2

This is an example of my skill in graphics and editing. We wanted to use the graphics from the opening of the film Se7en to inspire our own graphics, in particular, the jumping movement of the words, and the idea of numbers in the actual film title. To do this, we created several individual slides, and placed the word "Hidden" on each one, but in a different place on the screen. We then, for all but the first and last slide, replaced some of the letters with the corresponding numbers that you would use if you were texting the word "Hidden" (443336). I came up with this exact idea because I thought it worked well with the theme of texting in the opening of our film.

In addition to the ideas we took from the film Se7en, we decided to add individual effect to each word that gave a creepy effect. The one I chose for the example gives a good idea of the types of effects we chose. This part was a group effort - we looked through several different effects, and decided, as a group, which ones would work best. However, it was my idea to use a transition between shots to make it appear even more fidgety. The transition we chose was one where the screen folds in on itself several times before reappearing with the new slide, and we felt this was much more effective than simply having one slide after another.

Example Of My Editing Skills

This is an example of my personal editing skills. As mentioned in the previous post, our shots were all taken in daylight, but we want our film to be much darker. As you can see, we edited the shots so that they appear to be a much later time of day than they were actually shot. However, this shot in particular is an example of how editing can be used to help even out differences between shots. This shot was performed on a different day to most of the others, and as such, the level of light was different to the other shots. This specific day was much sunnier than the day that we did most of the shots, but unfortunately, simply adding more of the darker effects to this shot didn't even out the differences between shots, it simply made the details harder to see. In spite of this, I aimed to find a way to sort out this problem, and found that by using a colour tint to this shot, it made it appear more like the others. Now, it's much harder to tell that they were shot on different days.

Shot 2

Unlike the first shot I posted on here, this shot was originally in the storyboard, although, when actually at the location, I noticed that there was a large bush on the side of the path which Amalia runs down for this shot, I thought a good idea may be to move the camera so that it has the impression of someone jumping out from behind a bush in which they'd been hidden. The other members of my group agreed, as this shot was supposed to be a point of view shot from someone running after her, and this added to this effect. However, also unlike the first shot I posted, this shot took several takes, as I discovered that running after someone with a camera in your hand and keeping the camera steady enough to still see what's going on at the same time is very difficult. In the end, I decided to use small zooms to get closer to Amalia without having to run at the same speed as her, which allowed me to keep the camera steadier than previously. Although the shot is still pretty shaky, this was the effect we wanted, and you can still see Amalia clearly. We told her to run from the beginning of this path rather than just from where the shot begins, so that she's already in full flow when she passes the camera and it looks more natural. Obviously, when editing, we will cut the beginning and end of the shot, and, like the first shot, make it darker to seem like we filmed later than we actually did.

Shot 1

This is one of the shots that I filmed myself, of which I am most impressed with. It took only one attempt to film, although it wasn't in our original storyboard. This is because we underestimated the length of the path we use for our location when designing our storyboard, and we didn't allow enough shots to cover the whole path (although we thought we had when we planned it.) However, I'm quite glad we came up with it because it works very well. Amalia (our actress) was told to run from just before where she'd ended in the previous shot, and I zoomed the camera on her to a long-shot (I stood quite far away from her, as you'll see in the clip). As she ran, I zoomed out to show the full length of the path, and Amalia ran just out of shot and then across the front of the camera, the effect of which I really liked, as it was almost like an invisible wipe. I'm very proud of the fact that I managed to create such an interesting shot to solve a last minute problem, and of how it turned out on the first cut. Even though it's daytime and quite sunny, getting a darker effect for our thriller genre won't be a problem, as before going out to film, we played around with our editing software with a couple of practice shots to see how dark we could make the background without making details unnoticeable. We're confident that we'll be able to make this shot, and our others, look darker using the editing software.