My Evaluation

Film Studies Evaluation

My film’s genre was a psychological thriller and uses some of the aspects form this genre. Like keeping the audience guessing as to what is going to be happening next and constantly keeping them on their toes, along with the conventional use of thriller style lighting.
Looking back on my film product I have noticed certain things that I did not notice while I was making the film, my film was loosely based on the film Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) in the sense that I was a thriller film, even though it also contains other film genre aspects like crime drama and then utilised certain aspects from the film, for example the main character having insomnia. However after looking back on the film and getting feedback I now think that perhaps my film is a bit too much like Fight Club as most of the things about the film do echo the storyline of that specific film.

My job within mine and Alex’s group was editor and sound director, from my point of view I think that I did a good job utilising editing skills like graphic match, fades and transitions. I also think that the film that we made was well structured and flowed well with the narrative structure. I achieved this by cutting the film into nicely sized segments as well as adding effects to them to give them more of a dark feel. I thought that it was overall cut together well. However I also thought that there were some things within the film that did suffer because of certain things within the editing part of the project, one of these was that the editing had no specific style and although I originally thought this was a good thing after receiving feedback I realised that by having a style to use it can help the film flow and work better. Another thing that could have been done to help the film out would have been changing one of the scenes where one of the shots where it has bad continuity to the rest of the film due to the fact that at the end of the film after a shot change the actor was wearing different clothing to what he was originally wearing in the previous shot.
For sound I feel that the mood was set well due to the sound as it fitted well with the cinematography and scenery, the dialogue was also recorded well and fitted within the scene along with the sound effects that were later put into the film to add emphasis to the scene. However there were problems with the noise on the bus due to it’s engine as we cut up the footage as it caused the noise form the engine to sound jumpy and incoherent, but on the other hand this jumping noise when combined with the footage sounded good and complemented our work as it made it sound a lot more surreal and confusing. Another problem that we came across from sound was the mumbling of one of the actors within his scene, originally we had planned to give him lines as we faded out of the scene but decided in the end not to that as we were just going to be putting a voice-over it so in the end told him just to mumble, but after this we couldn’t completely cover the noise up or make it so that it sounded like quietened talking and after watching the film and getting feedback decided that we could have done it better.

Alex directed the film and I feel that he did a good job in doing so, the characters were all well placed and obvious to see who was who so there was no confusion, he also set up the scenes well and made sure that the rooms and areas that we used were secure so that we had limited or no unnecessary background noise. We used a variety of them in order to give the film a more realistic feel. So overall I would say that Alex did a good job of directing the film with only a few things that I would comment on.
Alex was also the cinematographer for the product and in this job Alex also did a good job, utilising good camera angles and lighting within the shots. Especially during one of the opening shots where we used a combination of starting off within the dark and then suddenly turning the light on giving a dramatic effect to scene due to the effect of it being dark and then the scene suddenly bursting into light.
Overall I feel that our film was good but could have been better if we ad made minor adjustments within certain shots and clips.