Evaluation

My film noir film that I made named The Mystery Letter is about a letter that a man name Bill receives that states “I know you’re cheating on your wife”, essentially his wife finds the letter and attempts to kill him but this fails. He later finds another letter that has identical handwriting and he discovers that the letter is actually sent from his administrator and before he writes to his friend his wife kills him with a clock. I am happy with the final result of the film even though there was several struggles along the way, I am happy with how it has turned out but I believe I could have done much better. The editing took less time than I expected because I have used final cut pro before so I didn’t need to learn how to use it so this saved me time and also I have the program on my own laptop so this gave me more time to edit my film compared to other girls in the class who had to use as much class time as they could and also hire laptops, this helped as I wasn’t stressed about finishing my editing on time and I could go at a steady pace. The only thing I would like to change out my film is the ending scene as I believe that we could have taken one more possible shot to make it more realistic but I don’t mind the two fast shots that were used to make the clock look as if it was hitting the man’s head. If I could start the project again I probably would have changed the story line as I feel our storyline is only the way it is because of the troubles we experienced along the way. This film wasn’t done to the best of my ability so that’s disappointing so I just hope this doesn’t dramatically affect my grade. This film was nothing like the original plan, our first plan was a lot better than this one but it has turned out the way I pictured it when we started our second film. I feel that the film is film noir and there are elements such as the flashback and the harsh shadows that depict this but this could have been done more so. I had majority of the shots to complete my film but again the last shot of the clock could’ve been done better with another shot from the man’s perspective of the clock coming in just to make it more realistic but other than that I am happy with the shots as there is a variety. We reshot a few shots that’s why our rough edit is a lot different to my completed film because we had to take more shots to make the storyline more visible and more interesting otherwise it would have been a quite boring 4 minutes. The group was initially going to work effectively but due Ellythea going on exchange with no notice and Mikayla and Serena being sick at different times made the project extremely hard as we missed out on a lot of lessons so this meant that a few afternoons were needed to make sure we didn’t fall behind even though we did a little bit. I used Final Cut Pro well as I sorted all the shots into different folders by scenes and this helped as it made the process a lot quicker instead of searching through the entire library for each shot. I didn’t experience many technical difficulties; the only difficulties I experienced were with group members, which was frustrating, as I had no control over that. I used storyboards and shot lists in the postproduction and this helped, as we knew exactly what we had to do when filming so that we didn’t waste any more time than we already did. The rough edit helped me a lot because I knew were I could improve the film and make it more interesting and this also told me where I needed to re shoot shots because you could see that they just didn’t work or didn’t look right. I could’ve have used the EDL and sound template a lot better but I found that my soundtrack and film was fine without it, I would rather make the film without the plan just because if one shot didn’t work I could change it or delete it. The only time management skills we struggled with were members being away sick, which wasted valuable time, but we eventually caught up so in the end this wasn’t a major issue. My blog was updated after every lesson in the last couple of weeks so this means I had 3 blog posts a week but they could’ve been more detailed and I could've done more posts earlier on in the task and that is what I will do next time but hopefully they are good enough for a good grade! I did enjoy this task but I am extremely excited for next terms work on music videos!