Opening Sequence Screening

On Wednesday 10th December, the Media Studies department held a screening for all of the groups opening sequences to be shown to our target audiences. We were told to invite some people in our target audience and ask them to fill out a simple questionnaire so we could get some feedback on our final cut. The screening went very well however, when it came to our piece, the soundtrack was not playing and it turned out that it was not on the exported file. Even though this happened we still managed to get our questionnaires filled out and we had some sensible feedback which we will talk about in our evaluation.

In our next lesson we opened up our project in Premiere to see whether the soundtrack was there or not and when we played it back it was. We do not know what happened in the screening but we still managed to get suitable feedback so it wasn't too much of a problem.

The results from the questionnaires were all very positive despite the fact the soundtrack didn't work. I would have to say that if the soundtrack worked we could have had much better feedback on our last question as the only improvements were to make sure the soundtrack worked.

Rough Cut Review

After presenting the rough cut of our opening sequence to the class, my group and I received both positive and negative feedback which we were pleased to keep both. Our group was rather nervous before showing the class the footage as we hadn’t shown that many people the progress we had made, however it was interesting to see what there reactions were like and whether the audience actually understood the story behind it.
After listening to the comments our audience had suggested it was obvious we needed to at look at the following things; how long our opening sequence lasted, music both non-diegetic and diegetic-which helps to anchor the images, ensure that the opening sequence comes across clearly as a opening sequence and not a trailer and finally piece all the loose ends together making sure everything is easy to understand. Our group has now taken into consideration the comments received and for our remaining editing time we will focus on these issues. My group and I knew when presenting our footage that there were areas which still needed clips added into it, as it was only our rough cut, but we were pleased to receive the negative issues as it tells us what we need to focus more of our time to. We will now make sure these issues are fixed by the required deadline. Furthermore when showing our rough cut we had not added our backing sound onto premier, meaning that our rough cut did not have the tense and scary atmosphere we were hoping for, however once this has been added my group feels it will transform our footage. This will then give the opening sequence an overall dramatic effect. Finally making sure the story is apparent to the audience, we feel that by the time we have finished all the editing the storyline will be obvious to the viewer. We were extremely pleased with the feedback because the comments were helpful for us to see what other people thought rather than just our group and also the positive comments were nice as they showed us that our hard work was paying off. The footage the audience seemed to enjoy the most were; 3 sudden shots which we anchored by music the shots used were extreme long shot, medium shot and close-up and finally they liked the ending shot where there is a punch, whish leads into the title, they said it was dramatic and effective. We feel our opening sequence makes you want to watch on to find out what happens.
Overall we felt presenting our rough cut was enormously successful.