Self Assessment of 'The Accident'

1a) How successful is the editing of framing/composition of the shots? Refer to specific shots and justify/deconstruct.

After going through the hard work of filming, editing and framing our movie ‘The Accident,’ was produced successfully. It took both me and our group to come to grips with the use of different camera techniques which are used in today’s media industry when editing a film. However, after a few practice shots and a quick go at learning how to use ‘Final Cut Express’ we were on our way to creating a successful film. Before filming our movie, we discussed what camera shots we were going to apply to

our film and how it would benefit and make our film clip look realistic to the audience. The square which encloses every frame/shot of our film became similar to a ‘window’ through which the audience/viewer is able to look into the world which we had created ourselves. Throughout the duration of my film ‘The Accident,’ I wanted the audience to want this to be their reality. However, the one thing we were continually reminded of when shooting our film was that even with the ‘window,’ it unfortunately does not provide the audience with the ability to look around and take in the surroundings and information that we give them; sadly the audience are limited to only the knowledge we provide them through visual imagery.

b) How successful is the editing? Refer to specific examples of cuts and explain how successfully (or not) the audience has been positioned.

I believe that the editing of our film was created successfully, for the reason that we spent a lot of time and effort considering the finest and most professional, realistic way to cut and edit our camera shots in a bid to create a well equipped film. When editing and trimming our shots on ‘Final Cut Express,’ we paid attention to detail and made sure that the shots flowed elegantly beside one another, rather than jumping from different scenes as this would make the film look messy and untidy. The shots that we paid most attention to were the ones which consisted of dialogue in view of the fact that each shot had to be edited extremely well because if even a second of the shot was slightly out of place, this would ruin the rest of the movie making us, the directors look like amateurs.

c) How efficient was the shoot?

When we started filming our movie, we were extremely excited to start as this was probably the first time for any of us where we were given the opportunity to act and direct in our own original film. We jumped straight into the task feet first and began shooting our film. For the majority of the filming we managed to stay in character and film well equipped professional scenes for our movie. However, there were times when we experienced a few hiccups and began to either laugh, trip of get disturbed by the school bell ringing halfway through a scene, but despite all of this we still managed to have fun and produced a great movie.

d) In hindsight, what would you do differently at any of the stages?

If I was given the opportunity to do something differently, I would want to re-create sections of our movie preferably filming in a different environment or setting because when we originally filmed sections of our film, we were often disturbed by other students or teachers passing by. Unfortunately, this disrupted our scenes as segments of it picked up background noise or foot steps from other people. Therefore, if we were given the chance to re-create some of the scenes from our movie we would be able to film in a quieter environment, making the film look more professional and realistic.