Blog Closed!

It is the end of our project and our blog is now closed.

Feel free to look around our blog, hope you enjoy all our work.

Michael, Anisah, Winnie and Jess x

Audience Feedback

The audience feedback we got from the audience during the screening was mixed. We had over 30 people attend, filling in questionnaires and the majority were able to identify the themes, target audience and genre of our opening.

Many of the comments were very positive and there was also a lot of constructive criticism to take into account. Below is an example of a questionnaire that was filled in by a member of the audience.

Audience Feedback

Screening

We decided to screen our sequence during a school lunchtime as this would be best for everyone.

We chose to invite years 11 and above, as they include 15 year olds+ and this is our target audience.

To make sure we had as many people as possible, we thought it would be a good idea to create a facebook group as this would advertise on a platform that the target audience would definitly use:

Furthermore, we made notices that would go in class registers so that any people we did not reach were aware of the screening.

Also, we designed a questionnaire with questions that would be important and helpful to use. We chose to use multiple choice answers so that they would be easy to fill out and data would be gathered more easily.

 

Titles

We have chosen to use a font from http://www.dafont.com/ named 'An Unfortunate Event,' as it looks simple but has a slight twist. It's easy to read and uneven, symbolising the disrupted equilibrium in the sequence itself.
Using LiveType application on Mac, we have been able to create effects add atmosphere, as it seems to crawl in, like the stranger who appears in Dark Summer. As we intended to layer the titles over the shots, instead of having cutaways we made the colour of the font white, so that it would contrast with the dark lighting of our shots.


We also made the final title, "Dark Summer" white because we wanted the last shot to fade to black.

Teacher Feedback

We received feedback from Mrs Blackborow, on our most recent edit with titles. The main points were:

• The typewriter sound effect when 'Impact Films' comes up goes on for too long, even after all of the letters have already shown up.
• Also, with the shot of the masked man at the window, she felt that the initial shot from the test shoot worked a lot better and had more of an impact and a grater reaction from the audience. We aim to add this shot into a new timeline and get feedback on which works best.
• The sound of the music box in the child's bedroom was too quiet Miss felt and after adjusting the volume of this, it sounds a lot more effective.
• The over minor detail of the sound was that when in the hallway, it was quite grainy and muffled due to the microphone. We took out the audio on this section, and it also works well.
• The final correction was moving the final title of 'Dark Summer' over a bit so that it does not fase out too soon.

This feedback was very helpful, and Mrs Blackborow was also very happy with our overall sequence.

4th Shoot

Despite the fact that we had planned in our third shoot to be our last, the shots we took did not make sense and we will have to arrange one last back up shoot to correct these mistakes.

What we have to change:
(1) As the girl walks into the room the window should be closed and the curtains drawn. In the last shoot the girl did not register that the window was open, which should have been a major factor. To counter this we have decided to keep the window and curtains closed to simplify things and to avoid confusion.

(2) The girl should walk up the second flight of stairs when looking for Summer. This is so the audience know that the girl has looked everywhere she can for Summer.

(3) Zoe will then sit on the stairs and start to panic. The house phone rings and she runs down the stairs to answer it. She picks up the phone, the last line she says is "What have you done with her". This is so we know that someone has taken Summer.

Sound Effects

When researching music for our opening sequence, we used a website called freeplaymusic.com, a website full of copyright free music. We found some possibilities to go with the actual footage and also sound effects for when the production company logo appears. The category of music in which we searched was, building tension and intensity.

 www.freeplaymusic.com/search/category_search.php?sindex=11&i=70&t=s

Option 1: Off Center- This was one of our favourites from the beginning. The music starts of slow and then builds up. There is a lot of tension and the echos within the music adds an edge and fits in with the genre of our film quite well.


Option 2: The Under World- This is also a possibility. The music starts of very quiet and than rapidly gets louder with sound effects in between creating a very spooky feel. This could work well, however only if we fitted the timing of the music and the sequence effectively.


Also, for our production logo of BFE Productions, I thought that we could use the first three seconds of 'Undercurrents' as it sounds similar to the sounds used in other production company logos and sounds professional.

Another posibility music wise to go with the production logo, is 'Behind the Haze', which sounds very cinematic and exciting. This is our favourite track so far out of the ones we listened to and can be found on this link: http://www.freeplaymusic.com/search/category_search.php?t=s&i=71