Rebecca Jarvis Film Evaluation

I think that overall, our film went quite well. We decided to try to create an opening sequence to a drama. We were quite heavily influenced by the film My Sister’s Keeper (Nick Cassavetes 2009) in which a young girl is born through IVF to save her terminally ill sister’s life but sues her parents for the rights to her own body. We adapted this where one sister, Holly, dies right at the beginning and we would follow the second sister, Rose, attempting to battle through the grief of Holly’s tragic death throughout the rest of the film. We used a similar idea for our opening as My Sister’s Keeper’s opening scene. It uses a series of flashbacks, which look like home movies, which was where we got the idea for ours from.

This Youtube video shows a clip from the opening scene of My Sister’s Keeper. We liked the idea of making it look like a home video and tried to re create this in our film by not using a tripod for some of the flashbacks. This gave us the effect we were looking for however I think that in some shots it is too shaky and it is slightly distracting from what is actually happening. This is also where we got the idea of changing the intensity of the colours, which helped separate the flashbacks from the hospital scenes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS55xHZWzEo

My main role in the group was to manage sound but as one member of our group left, all 4 areas were split between just 2 of us, so I also took part with some cinematography and the directing. The first and last scene was shot to look like a hospital and i decided to just have diegetic sound during these scenes to create a more realistic atmosphere. However, I had a problem trying to find any hospital related sound effects. I had to try and re create a hospital atmosphere by using other sound effects and layering them on top of each other. Some of the sound effects I used were called Hairdryer, Rocket Doors Closing and Baby Crying. Although these sounds are not related to a hospital in any way (with the exception of Baby Crying) together they worked well and created the correct atmosphere that we were looking for in these scenes.

During the flashbacks I thought it would be good if the music was quite relaxing and simple. I created a track on GarageBand which was a simple acoustic guitar plucking but I think it worked well, was very effective with the footage and I got the response I was looking for when others watched our film. However I think I could have made a better soundtrack if I had more time as I personally think it is a bit repetitive and we spent a lot more time editing rather than producing the soundtrack.

We had a few problems while editing as we realised after watching our footage, in the hospital scene we recorded the wrong bits and so we had a bit of trouble whilst trying to edit it. Because of this we lost some of the shots that we had planned but we cut up the accidental footage we had filmed instead and managed to slow it down so it would cover a decent time length.

We tried to make it clear that it was told through flashbacks by putting a video filter on to change the colours and saturation of the video. For the flashbacks we enhanced the colours of the image and for the parts that aren’t flashbacks. We made the colours very dull and miserable which also reflected the emotions in the film at that specific time. I really liked this effect and I think it worked well and it was obvious that they were flashbacks, which I thought would be a possible problem.

Enhanced colours:

Dull colours:

When Jake Wynne (Director and Editor) came in to talk to us he gave us some really good productive feedback about our film. He suggested that we add a voice over into it, which we were thinking about doing anyway, to ensure people knew that they were flashbacks and what was happening. We eventually decided against it as we thought it was quite obvious what were flashbacks because of the colour change and we also did not really have enough time after the idea was suggested to complete Normal.dotm 0 0 1 88 502 LR6FC 4 1 616 12.0 this. However I think a voice over would have been a good idea because, if we wrote it well, it would have made our film more emotional which was the intended idea of it. He also gave us some positive feedback and told us what he thought was good about our film. He told us he liked how we have shown the flashbacks. He also liked the clip with the shadows and thought it was a good way to help portray the relationship between the two sisters. He also told us that the music went well with the clip and it helped make it more emotional.

Overall I think the creating process for our film went quite well and our end result was good. Our film is typical of it's genre and we got the response we wanted from other viewers.