Rough Cut - Miss Miller

A rough cut is important to consider because it allows you to collect feedback from people who watch it and improve on the constructive criticism they give you, this helps make the final opening scenaration better as you get the audiences opinions on the clip that resembles the final finished product. Without a rough cut, the clip may not be seen with its full potential, meaning if it was submitted it would not get as many marks as it could of had. 


Audience feedback is also very important to consider, this is because it gives you a different and fresh perspective on our opening sequence. It allows us take into consideration the audiences constructive criticism to help us improve the elements that may not be working, but also tell you what they feel the strengths of the clip are and are effective, allowing us to know which parts to enhance, or ensure we do not cut them out or shorten.

My group and I created a presentation for our class to allow them to get the understanding of our clip by telling them about our narrative and what we wanted to achieve through our opening scenario. This enabled them to give us feedback as they were able to give their opinions based on how well we pulled it off by comparing it to how we explained what we wanted to portray and achieve. Our presentation included;

• Our individual ideas for a narrative.
• Those ideas put together to make our final narrative and what that was.
• What we wanted to create and how we think we have created it.
• How is it conventional to the thriller genre.

After the presentation, we then showed our class our rough cut of our thriller sequence, which we had exported to youtube previously, which allowed their feedback to be given through comments on the video. 

When receiving feedback, we were told that we had many strengths and weaknesses. Our strengths included;

• Good use of low key lighting - conventional
• Good variety of shots used - high angles, low angles, eye levelled shot, handheld, etc
• Good variety of shot distances - Close up, Extreme close up, long shot, aerial shot, etc
• Good use of sound - builds tension/suspense.

Our weaknesses included; 

• An unclear confusing plot.
• Not enough credits.
• Transitions between frames was 'messy'.

We took the weaknesses given to us into consideration and decided to act on them by changing them or deleting parts. Starting with the making the plot clearer, for this, we are going to add in some footage which shows the older sister in our narrative placing the gloves used to kill the little girl into a bag and throwing this into the forest. This would hint to viewers that perhaps the older sister was involved in the killing, and so would leave them wondering what her motives were. Although this was a weakness, it was also good because we wanted to leave the audience feeling confused, which we did, but having gained the feedback, now know that we should be leaving the audience questioning what happened, instead of them not knowing what they have just watched. 

The weakness of there not being enough credits is a fair comment, simply because we had not finished all of the credits yet. It was good to show the few credits we had made as there were no comments as to the fading and blurring on/off of these credits, and so I have assumed these were effective, although it is hard to tell without them all being completed. 

The tranisitions between the frames needs polishing, as it was commented that they looked messy. This probally occured whilst cutting down the clip to under 2 minutes, as the sounds that originally matched the images, no longer do. To improve this, it will mean slowly going through the entire clip, and making sure that all the edits and sounds etc match the images.

The feedback given to us will help us finalise our thriller opening sequence as it has given us ideas and a different perspective of ways in which we should improve our clip. This has now given us the understanding of the audiences reactions and opinions meaning we can adjust and alter certain elements to help bring out the full potential our thriller could possibly have.