Draft Evaluation- Tom Snell

Overall, I am pleased with how our sequence turned out. We decided to create an extract from a drama, as it meant it gave us a large amount of creativity, and the freedom to cover a wide range of topics. Having seen films such as August Rush, we decided to go down a similar road,with our main character being bullied and lonely, but finding a way out through playing guitar. This meant we had the opportunity to experiment greatly with how sound would be used, and how the use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound affects our piece. My role within our group was editor.

Throughout the planning process we modified our basic story several times to make sure our narrative was cohesive and easy to follow whilst still being interesting to watch. Our previous idea was to have our main character on stage, performing to a large crowd whilst remembering various key points in his life. We decided against this after being advised that it would be difficult to create a convincing stage sequence. Also, as it was based around a great deal of short flashbacks it would feel that it was a whole film instead of a short sequence.As I was editor, I watched other films from the same genre such as ‘August Rush’ to learn how these films are edited. I discovered that the editing in these films usually focuses on clarity and continuity over style. I emulated this by using simplistic editing techniques that didn't distract from the story. I also needed to know how to properly edit a sequence of guitar playing. During the editing process I discovered that the image of the guitar being played and the audio can go out of sync with each other. This was a problem in the original edit of our sequence as it focused more heavily on the guitar being played, but after we re-edited, it was less of an issue.

As a group, we worked well together. We planned heavily in lesson time to make sure that when we did film, everything would run smoothly with minimal problems. However, due to the fact that we couldn't all get to our location at the same time due to timing constraints, Alex had to film all the scenes in his house on his own. As he was cinematographer, this wasn't much of an issue as he had access to our storyboards and shot list. As he had to operate the camera and act on his own, it made my job as editor harder as it meant that I had a large amount of excess footage to cut. Although this made my job longer, it was surprisingly useful as it meant I could use some of the clips to improve the continuity of the piece. For example, during the conversation scene, the footage of Alex sitting down comes from him moving away from the camera, having set it up. The clip below highlighted in red was originally deleted as it showed what I mentioned above, but was put back in to improve the flow of the sequence.

However, as he filmed on his own, Alex was more susceptible to making mistakes. As the images below shows, there is a break in continuity as Alex leaves the house with a guitar, but when entering college you can clearly see the guitar on his back. To make this less obvious, I shortened the clip of Alex leavingthe house.

The main challenge I faced as Editor was how to order the shots in a way that was interesting to watch, but also made for coherent narrative. In my original edit there was much more emphasis on the music and guitar playing. This was changed after a visit from Jake Wynne, who used his experience to develop our idea and re-order the shots to put emphasis on the narrative. By simply removing several shots and changing how the sound is used, a massively different feel is given to the sequence. Another task I had to complete was, working closely with our Sound Editor Harvey, to edit the sound to fit in with the what was happening on screen. The image below shows how we very slightly dipped the volume of the guitar playing that is present throughout the whole piece during the conversation. We did this mainly so that the conversation could be heard but also because we layered some other sound effects, such as a washing machine, to give the scene greater realism.

The piece of editing I feel is the most effective is the scene our protagonist first picks up his guitar. I feel it is effective as the match on action of Alex picking up the guitar, adjusting the knobs and finally playing flows extremely well and looks natural. The transition of non-diegetic to diegetic guitar playing is also smooth, and reflects on the mood of the scene. Our peer feedback was positive overall, however some people commented on how the narrative was slightly unclear. I am really pleased with the end result, as it is our first attempt at this sort of project.