Diary Post 10

Today we finished editing our film. The editing process took us an incredibly long time, due to all the different features involved in it, including green screen, and multiple sound effects that had to be incorporated, as well as the fact we didn't stick to one straight scene. Again, we found rendering to be a serious issue, due to the ridiculous length of time it took - sometimes exceeding half an hour. However, because of the different features, we feel that our final product turned out well, although there are a few tweaks we would have made if we had more time, eg. making our own original music.

There were some major changes to our final product when compared to the storyboard and treatment. Orginally we had intended to overlay dialogue over the chase scene, but during editing we found that the sound levels were too low, and any attempt at it gave poor results. Instead we decided to use the entire visuals from the the Villain's speech and also change the order the broadcast went in - the news report came back on after the villains speech, rather than at the end. This worked well, and I'm glad we made the change. The final product can be seen in the following post.

Rough Cut 2

Today we made the final touches to our media product, adding in the ident, and perfecting any issues with the sequence. We then proceeded to upload this to youtube. However, after doing so, we realised the length of our product was far too long, exceeding the maximum time limit. We also noticed a piece of footage at the end that was no supposed to be there. This meant we are going to have to go back and cut a lot of the footage out. We anticipate that this will be parts of the Villain's speech, as we have agreed it does drag on. Hopefully it will still make sense after editing.

Our 2nd rough cut is embedded below.

Rough Cut and Audience Feedback

Above, I have embedded our rough cut. Due to the complexity of our task, we still had a plethora of tasks left to do by the rough cut deadline, for example some footage was in need of being re-filmed. This is evident by the above clip, which is lacking. There are issues with sound, missing footage, unfinished elements, and the ident also isn't in place. Despite this, we have had some successes, an example of which is the green screen; chroma key has worked well for us, and we have managed to insert a convincing background.

Although we are well aware of the many improvements needed, and abundance of remaining tasks to complete, we asked our target audience for feedback so that we could further improve our work, and also to see what we had done well.

Feedback -

Kyle Smith - "The costume is very effective, and the fake blood used on the zombies looks very realistic"

Adam Grove - "The continuity for the chase scene is good, but sound effects need to be added"

India Lawton - "The green screen has worked really well"

Jessica Cox - "The actual footage of the zombies is good, I think when everything is done it will look great"

Blake Funnell "You need to sort out issues with sound, but other than that, it's looking good. The zombie make-up looks realistic, which is important"

The above feedback has helped us pinpoint exactly what we need to improve on the most. It is clear from the feedback, and also from watching it myself, that it is imperative we deal with sound issues - both sound levels and lack of effects. The audience has also told us that our costume is particularly effective, which was indicated as a major factor when interviewing others for the research section of our foundation portfolio.

Diary Post 9

Over the course of this week, we have been editing our footage. This has been an incredibly lengthly process, due to rendering. This would not have been so much of a problem if we had not used an slr, but the superior quality we achieved from it, outweighs this frustration.

We also made the intro for our news scene. We did this by creating a logo on photoshop, giving it some transparency, importing it to final cut pro, and adding the grow motion. We also used an existing broadcast theme from soundtrack pro that we overlaid onto it. We had originally intended to create our own broadcast theme, but this proved to be too difficult in the given time constraint.