We have held a couple of criticism sessions in class to gain feedback on our edits. I picked up some very useful feedback from these sessions which I have made note of and intend to use to improve my video. The main points made were:
1. There was a distinctive and awkward break in between the first half and second half of the video visually and audibly.
Comment: I agree, her voice changes significantly between the end of the first bit and the start of the second. I need to cover this with a cutaway to smooth it over as it won't be as obvious when you can't see her talk. Unfortunately I can't change the fact that she was slightly laughing when she said that line, but it has taught me that I should have gone through that question again with her so I could edit over that version.
2. The narrative across the video isn't very fluent.
Comment: I agree. I had tried to create a narrative about how she got to the access course, but watching it repeatedly I can now see that it makes chronological sense for her to talk about her school experience before she talks about coming on to the course and so I will improve the narrative by restructuring the answers she gives
3. Some of the cutaways don't make much contextual sense.
Comment: Due to the way she answered the questions I had to make quite a few edits in order to construct an artificial sentence that was more coherent for the video and shorter in length; so I have had to use cutaways to cover these gaps but it is hard for me to find something relevant to what she is saying. I will try and use more cutaways of students working as this makes more sense and think about what she is saying. I have also found some cutaways with the subject of my interview in them so I will include those.
4. The content of the cutaways didn't show the college/course in a positive way.
Comment: Some of the cutaways I have included include boring shows of teachers writing on the blackboard. I included these because they were relevant to my subject talking about being a teaching assistant but having boring shots of teachers does not create the impression that this is something interesting and beneficial to them. I will try and find shots of the teachers being more active and more personal to prevent alienating the viewer.
5. The video needs to be colour corrected.
Comment: I had tried to use the white balance technique demonstrated to us and on the interview tape you can see a short section before I set the white balance. While slightly better it is far from perfect and so I will apply a colour correction filter that I will manually adjust to improve the image quality.
