Rough & Final

We got together as a class, both day and night classes, and watched our rough cuts on Saturday November 8th. It was great to see what the day class had been working on as we hadn't read their scripts or helped on their shoots. It wasn't just watching the rough cuts, we also held a group critique. After each film was screened 12 people gave their opinions on it. I was still at the point where I wasn't happy with my cut. It is a horror movie with some action in it. I had only been working on editing and had not done any work on soundtrack or sound effects. This had a completely negative effect on my film. The "hits" just weren't believable without sounds. 

With our final cut due on the following Saturday I spent a huge amount of time in the editing labs. First I finished off the video editing completely then I moved into adding sound effects. This was a lengthy process as you had to look through a"Sound Library" on the school's shared hard drive. Once you found sound which you think might work, you import it to Final Cut Pro, lay it into your short and then play it back. Of course there are a ton of different impact sounds and you can't really tell what will work best until you see/hear it. Having gotten my sounds in (hammer hits, kicks, glass breaking, door hits, etc.) I moved onto the soundtrack . William Davenport helped me with this as we really aren't learning this program yet. Same with the sound effects, you look through the library, pick a song, and lay it in. Another lengthy process, but essential to a film like mine. I was out at school every day this week spending hours and hours working on three minutes of film. Three minutes of a film that I have seen every frame countless times... Three minutes of film that I am tired of looking at. 

The final draft critique was once again a group effort. Where last week we spent our time critiquing coverage, this week we covered story, acting, and production value. It was a long day and rather brutal. Everyone picked apart everyone else's film. Some of the critiques regarding my short was that there wasn't enough character development with my main character and that it felt like a scene from a movie and not necessarily a complete short. These were completely valid and I felt the same. We discussed the lack of character development when I first started working on this project as it would be tough to add to a three minute short. Overall, I was really happy with my finished product. For a while every time I told myself that I wouldn't show it to anyone. haha. Now I am proud of it. Would I change anything? Of course I would. I would like to have the entire shooting day to do over... 

A few of us walked over to the Dogpatch Saloon for a post game analysis (read: drinking session). It was both cathartic and incredibly necessary to drink a beer! No rest for the weekend as we start our first Documentary Class in two days...