Evaluating the Finished film: Portrait of Place

During the editing process we found that the XM-2 fell short of what we wanted in terms of quality and often had vastly different colour balances between shots, which we had to fix in post production. A big problem for us was that we had too much footage and found it hard to fit it all into just three minutes and had to cut out nearly two minutes by the end, perhaps we could have planned the timing better. Looking back over the shots on the Mac I thought that we had been very sucessful in getting the exact shots and style that we had gone for. We also added a Vignette filter and feathered the edges of the shot after we colour corrected to add an interesting style to the film. I thought that this film focused the viewer and made the whole shot look more aesthetically pleasing to the audience. We had tried to mix up the shots and keep them all interesting and engaging to the viewer. I believe we did this quite well because when I watch short films of this kind that do not grab my attention I find myself looking around the room by accident and losing interest whereas I was concentrating on the film every time we played it back. My favourite part of the film was the moving close up or over the shoulder shots because I love the effect and how it makes you feel so close to the protagonist as well as the action. I had to work quite hard to get this shot walking up the steep hills over bumps, dips and a few fallen trees to get the shot and keep it as steady as possible. We tried to get a subtle shakey camera effect, which gradually increased over time. This shake effect creates a sense of panic in the viewer and we wanted the audience to relate to the protagonists feelings and realise how stressed and worried he would be. To improve this film I would like to have got a few more scenic shots showing off the surroundings as looking back through my footage some of it seems like a total waste of a great landscape to shoot in. Also I think that we may have concentrated too heavily on technique and not enough on developing an interesting enough story for the short film as the protagonist just gets lost in our film. Overall the film worked quite well and told the Hikers story in an engaging way with some quite interesting shots that differed from the standard shots you would expect to cover the same action sequence.