Evaluation

Now that my project is finished, I have gained a proper understanding of what worked and went well and what didn’t.

First of all, my audio-visual piece. When writing my initial script, I was very under confident in everything I produced and found it hard to enjoy the read of it, I decided because of these difficulties I would produce a simple script that had room for improvisation and improvement. I aimed to incorporate a range of camera angles and movements to keep a pace to the scenes. When it came to the editing process I realised that what I had filmed was only half the minimal required time for the production, so I had to quickly write a new scene in addition to the others. I have to say that the police room scene is my favourite out of the three; the pressure to produce in a short time meant I couldn’t allow myself to overthink what I had written which I feel had a positive result. In terms of filming, I have had little experience before this coursework which I feel is evident in scene 1 and 2 (which I filmed first), in scene 2 which I filmed a couple of weeks later, I feel it is evident to see my improvement in camera work. I used natural lighting for all my scenes which I feel paid off in scene three. The forest lighting was a surreal touch to the narrative and I really liked the gloomy effect it has. In terms of sound I feel that I was limited in some sense; I used a boom mic for all the scenes, hovering it as close to the actors as possible without it being in shot but it still didn’t pick up the volume of sounded I had hoped. My editing process exaggerated this as even when my background music was almost silent, my character’s voices just wouldn’t come out as loud as I wanted.

For my magazine, my final piece ended up completely different from my plan. Initially I wanted to produce a front cover similar to that of Ex Machina. I took photos of the main actor on my phone, I loved one picture and felt it captured the sophisticated look similar to that of GQ magazine. But when it came to editing the photo and creating the magazine I couldn’t quite fit the look of the photo with the Ex Machina sci-fi effect. I decided that the look didn’t follow conventional lifestyle magazine front covers; which have bright colours and large advertisements. Which is why I changed the main cover picture. Overall I am happy with my magazine both double page and front cover, I feel I achieved a minimalistic design whilst still following traditional lifestyle magazine conventions. Writing the main content of my article I found relatively easy, sticking to an informal tone addressing the audience as a third party but still establishing a relationship between the interviewees and the audience.