- The first two thirds are stronger than the last third.
- The sound works well at the beginning.
- Something needs to happen in the loo.
- The handle is a good closing shot.
- Too grainy.
- Yawn works well.
- The pacing is strong.
- A Compressed(fast) feel to the film.
- Tooth paste is a good shot.
- Lacking camera movement.
- It has the feeling of being shot in the morning.
Positive:
The sound works well at the beginning.
I take this to mean that the sound effects I recorded and downloaded were effective in enhancing the clips.
The handle is a good closing shot.
I was aiming to have a solid opening and closing shot, so it's good to know that the final shot is well received.
Yawn works well.
I really liked the concept of the yawn shot. Having one continuous shot interrupted by the eye rubbing and then returning to the same shot I thought was a good idea. It could have been shot better but I am glad the concept was well received.
The pacing is strong.
This is good because while the majority of my shots are 12 frames long I made some of them deliberately longer to change up the pacing and give focus to certain things amongst the fast cuts.
A Compressed(fast) feel to the film.
This is good to hear because the main point of the film according to the brief is to create a faced paced video with 20 cuts in 15 seconds. Knowing that I have covered the primary objective on the brief is comforting.
Tooth paste is a good shot.
I was worried about this shot as the camera I was using didn't have any manual focus options and it was impossible for me to hold the tooth brush and toothpaste at a decent distance from the camera and when I watched what I had recorded I was disappointed to find it was blurry and out of focus. I have edited the clip to look better and it is good to know that the clip doesn't look as bad as I had originally thought.
It has the feeling of being shot in the morning.
This is good news. I didn't get to film it in the morning because my model was not available until the afternoon and I had many issues with the lighting. I tried to correct this in post production and it is good to know that when watching it appears to be during the morning even though it is not.
Negative:
The first two thirds are stronger than the last third.
The final third would involve the going to the toilet, washing hands, drying hands and then going in to the door. It is a shame that people felt the final third is weaker, as you don't want to end on something worse than the rest. That part of the sequence doesn't have as much interesting things going on in it as the others which may explain why. It's too late to do anything about at this stage but it might have been more dramatic and interesting if he had washed his face and dried it than gone to the toilet.
Still, the final third wasn't said to be bad just not as good as the rest so there is no emergency.
Something needs to happen in the loo.
I disagree with this point. Although it makes sense for continuity, it is a bit obscene and unnecessary. I originally put in my thumbnails before my full storyboards for there to be a shot with liquid going in to the toilet but as I have stated it isn't needed. If you watch my Shaun of the Dead research which inspired my toilet scene it leaves out this part of the sequence.
Where I show the toilet seat being lifted, Shaun of the dead shows the characters zipper being pulled down. While they are different shots, they both serve the same purpose of establishing what action is about to take place. The next shot in both my film and Shaun of the Dead is the lever of the toilet being pulled. This is a narrative/editing technique called 'Ellipsis', which means missing out a section of the narrative leaving the audience to fill in the gaps. This is appropriate for scenes that might be obscene like the suggested 'Something needs to happen in the loo'.
Too grainy.
This is the biggest problem I have found in my own video. It was very frustrating to find that my footage was very grainy, full of noise. I thought there might be a problem with the camera but after looking at other people's footage with the same camera it seems to be down to the lack of natural light. For this reason, I can't re-shoot to improve it as the lack of natural light is a limitation of the situation I need to shoot. I have tried several filters and post production effects to reduce the noise but it degrades the quality of the footage in a different way so I have decided to just leave it and bear this in mind for future projects.
Lacking camera movement.
I agree. I had planned for a pan or 2 but my lack of experience with the camera proved to have limited compatibility with my imagination. The toothpaste shot was going to follow the toothpaste in an extreme closeup across the brush but I had trouble even getting it in frame. All of my shots are very static and I would have liked to have zooms on all the shots like in Shaun of the Dead. The problem there was that I couldn't zoom while filming without jogging the camera because of the way you use the zoom and adding zoom in post production means you have to scales the clip and this lowers the quality further so I decided against this in the end.