Rough Cut 1 - Audience Feedback

We showed the rough cut to a group of people to hear their feedback on what they liked about it and what they thought we could improve on.

What they liked

• They commented on the fast editing of the diary between the close ups of words and the mid shot of the whole open book
• They also liked the colour grade of the whole trailer
• They thought is was very easy to understand what was going on

Points to Improve 

• Change the edit in scene two to slow down the pace of it so it does not feel as rushed and confusing
• Add in the music which will hopefully lift it all 
• A lot of work needs to be done to the diegetic sounds, which we will fix by adding in the sound from from the Digital Audio Recorder.

Initial Poster Idea

Initially, I wanted to go for a poster to reflect the happy nature of the first act of the trailer, but with some deformity showing how everything is not as it seems. I decided to go for this shot from the film as I thought it was a very nice looking shot and I could do lots with it.

However, I could not find a still from the film where both of the actors were looking nice - as you can see here, it looks like our main actress is mid-sneeze. I chose to use two different stills, which I carefully blended together to give the result below.

I'm really pleased with the result - you can hardly tell that there are two shots there - the discolouration on the girl's hair was actually an in-camera error. After blending the photos, I added a levels adjustment to increase the contrast a little - the final grade is on the top, original on bottom for comparison, as it can be quite difficult to see the difference otherwise.

I added in the title from the film - this creates a brand coherency we were keen to achieve with our ancillary marketing products.

I then started to add some film festival logos, like these ones:

Giving a final, unfinished result:

However, in the end I decided that my initial idea was flawed - I felt that this kind of poster didn't truly reflect the thriller genre, and wouldn't be able to get across the intended meaning effectively. I scrapped this project, and started again.

Rough Cut 1

Here is the first rough cut for our final product, we have put all of the clips filmed on day 1 and 2 of filming together along with the idents. The colour grade has begun on some of the shots but there is still a long way to go on many. Currently the only sound for all of it apart from scene 1 is camera sound so this will need to be replaced with sound from the Digital Audio Recorder. Also currently it reaches 2 minutes 48 seconds in length with still 4 scenes to film, making it well over our target of 2 minutes so we plan to cut a large amount of it down.

Scene 1 Filming

We arranged to meet our actors at 2pm at the location for the last shot of the scene, we made the conscious decision to film the last shot of the scene first as we wanted it to stand out from the others and to seem at bit off. We chose to convey this through the tight shot with the backdrop of a brick wall juxtaposing the previous green open shots. On top of this we hoped our chose to film it first would give the two actors took time for the chemistry to build between them so they would seem more natural together, giving off the impression that they were in fact in love in the previous shots chronologically in the film

We experienced a few problems getting the sound to work at first which held up the filming of the first shot, despite this, once we started everything went very smoothly with no problems apart from having to deal with a few passers by which was to be expected with filming in a public location.

We managed to finish filming the scene within 2 and a half hours getting every shot on our storyboard with the exception that we changed the pedalos shot to on a bridge as the pedalos were shut up because of the weather. However, it turned out for the better as the bridge which we had not noticed on our location scouting ended up being a very cinematic location.

See below a photo of us setting up to film the first shot

Scene 1 Colour Correction

I have had improved my colour correction for scene 1.

Below I have put some screenshots of my efforts. In general I increased the contrast by lowering the shadows (and sometimes blacks) a bit and increasing the shadows. The cloudy day meant that I have increased both the temperature and saturation to make the film look more autumnal/end-of-summery than overcast. On the brick wall shot I added some sharpness.


Before                                                                     After



Before                                                                     After

Before                                                                     After

Before                                                                     After

After                                                                       Before


After                                                                       Before

After                                                                       Before

After                                                                       Before

After                                                                       Before

Scene 1, Rough Cut 1

Here is the first rough cut of our film. I have matched together the sound from the DAC and the video. This was especially tricky in the scene below because of the placement of the boom mic - it is behind the pillar nearest to the actors at the start. Because of the mic in this position, the sound of running was less than optimal. I used the sound from the camera microphone to fix this a little. The in-camera sound was fine because it's a prosumer camcorder (so designed to have good sound quality) and not a DSLR.

I also had a quick look at a first view of some colour correction/grading. I did this because it was set on a sunny day but the shooting day itself was rather overcast. It is very much a first draft but it's good to get an idea.

Location scouting - House



 Here you can see the house we have chosen to use to shoot all of our inside scenes. We chose it because of the very cinematic feel we felt it had, especially at the table that we plan to shoot scene 2 at, it is next to large French Windows which will create the bright open shot we want for the first act of our film. In contrast to this, the hallway that can be seen on the right, to be used in scene 10, will work well for the Dutch angle silhouette shot of the father. The bedroom at the top above will be used in scene  8, 13 and 16, it looks like a very stereotypical teenage girl's room which is the look we are going for and we will be able to play around with a combination of natural lighting from the window and the bedside lamp see above.