Finished Evaluation

Final finished Short Film

This is my final short film finished with focus group and feedback taken into account and with finished final touches with the editing all finished :)

Final Focus Group

I showed two people from my focus group, Rhea (aged 19) and Ryan (aged 18) my short film to get their reactions and for them to answer a few questions with constructive criticism and honesty. I let them watch it first with me not in the room and then went in and filmed them watching it again allowing them to pause it whenever they felt they wanted to discuss something they felt was important. I liked this way of doing it as they could openly talk about anything instead of being restricted to certain questions and they can talk about it as its happening rather than having to remember it all. The only problem with doing it like that is it might mean the more quiet shy people wouldn't talk and contribute as much but luckily for me my two people were happy enough to talk to me and the camera comfortably. It was interesting finding out what they thought of it as they are my intended audience that I was aiming for.




I'd edited it slightly and cut out some of what they said and noticed I missed out something that Rhea had said that was quite beneficial. She said that she could imagine my poster to be put in an independent cinema leaflet, for example for Cinema City or in a leaflet/booklet for advertising the independent and individual aspects of Norwich.

Final Film Poster

The changes I made to the final film poster :

• I added the PG age certificate to ensure people who watched it were aware that whilst it's quite innocent, its still not completely suitable for children under the age of 8 because of its morbid storyline and death being shown which could be a little distressing and confusing for them.
• I ensured it had a realistic release date in the theatres, even though it will be only released for a few screenings at art house cinemas such as Cinema City because of how its a short film and might only be shown at short film festival viewings.
• I made sure it flowed by doing white lines that enclosed (boxed-in) some of the letters and linked the tagline "when life gets a little.." 
• I included a photo of one of the props (box-head) to link in with the film and magazine review.

Final Magazine article

Final recording of the song and editing

Rhea concentrating hard on playing the song by Beck on her piano whilst I recorded it from microphone onto Garage Band.

The professional microphone I used to put near the piano as she played to pick the sound up well and not pick up too much background noise.

Using Garage Band I edited the song that I recorded with Rhea and her piano. I had to drag the pieces of individual music I recorded together so it fitted and sounded as though it flowed.

To cut out any of the sound that was made after or before her playing, for example me saying stop or go, I had to click on the particular clip then onto Edit along the top then on Split. 

This would then split the clip so I could then highlight that and then press the back button or delete button to get rid of it.

     

    Because I think the piano sounded too plain and not professional and surreal enough I decided to edit and change the sound by adding an effect to it so it sort of sounded like another instrument, this distorted it slightly and gave it that edge I wanted.

  I chose two parts of my song to be in Wave Bass and the other in Digital Horns, this changed it a little to give definition to the chorus and verses.

As the final thing I done to it, I decided to sing in it because I wanted the line "everybody's gotta learn sometime" to be in it as though its a message in the film. I only sang in one bit as I wanted the main focus on the piano music and how its very repetitive which reflects the characters in the films lives.

Recording the Song and Rhea

Tonight I am attempting to record Rhea performing on piano and singing my chosen song "Everybody's gotta learn sometime" by Beck. I didn't want the hassle with all the copyright business so decided to get a friend (Rhea) who is a professional musician and music student to help me.

We met up and talked about what I wanted from her voice and then decided to just use a piano for the backing music.

As a way of recording on my Mac I can either record through photo booth, through iMovie, through garage band or record it on a recording device and then upload it to iMovie as an audio file.
Luckily, Rhea has a microphone that I can plug straight into my Mac and then record straight onto Garage band were I can then edit it to how I would like it.

Problems we encountered tonight : 

• Hard to find the right key that fits in with how I wanted and imagined it would sound, whilst still fitting in with Rhea's voice style. 

NEXT TASK :  meet up with Rhea again after I have tried recording the song myself and then finding the right key on the piano to match and recording the piano onto a different layer on garage band and then editing them together.

 A picture of the music Rhea was using, she had got the sheet music from the internet, but had found the guitar tabs etc to be too hard to play so opted to play it on the piano instead. I was ok with this as I liked the sound it made and it worked well :)

You can see me on the left holding my laptop. I wanted to take some photos of her playing etc, sort of documenting it. But I didn't have a camera with me so  instead I took the photos using the built in webcam on my laptop using the program photo booth.

Rhea playing the piano and singing.