Feedback comments. Nicole.

Here I’ve written about the overall feedback comments and evaluative explanations for some of our criticisms, along with some screen grabs of our film to show the highlighted parts of our film.

Positive:

+Great original storyline
+Great soundtrack behind first half
+Good match on action
+Fade between kids from younger to older – very good (furthermore – mise en scene is really good here)
+Shots when Ben’s getting changed in front of mirror very good and looks very professional
+Good use of non digetic sound in the background and the editing
+Transitions are really well done
+First scene works really well where it switches between the two where they are sorting out the sound for the computer
+Clever how you brought back the same soundtrack from the beginning to the ending
+Good idea of having no dialogue in it
+The radio broadcast – unique and funny

Negative
-Letter shot – too quick so not enough time to read it
-Some of the scenes were too dark
-Could have muted some ambient sound when it switched to and from both of them (just after she walks away from the door)
-Could have varied few more shots
-When Sophie is texting its clear it was done at night and the boy receives the text in broad daylight!

Evidently there is more positive feedback than negative. But from what has been said, I think our strongest points and elements of our film were the sound choices, original storyline and ideas for shots. From the audience feedback, our best shots seem to of been:

The fade between the two characters



Shots of Ben getting changed:



The first few shots of Sophie/Daniel speaking online:



Looking at the negative feedback, there are clearly a couple of things we should have taken into account and if we had the time, would have definitely improved.
Many people have highlighted how they didn’t feel they had enough time to read the letter and some of the msn convosations. Although my group have tested it ourselves, this has been seen as a problem so if we had the chance we would have definitely made that shot longer.



A big problem we seemed to have was the lighting of some of the shots, as many turned out to be too dark. For example, the scene when Sophie comes home and texts Ben and the scene when Ben is writing the letter;



This was partly due to the fact we had limited time to do some scenes, as most of the filming days were done after college late in the evening, and the times varied therefore the lighting and naturalistic light varied.

The comment that was made about how we could have varied the shots more didn’t go down well with our group, as we felt we had used a variety of shots and ideas! We didn’t want it too varied as we felt that wouldn’t fit the social realism conventions.

Overall, our group is very happy with the feedback we got and found it useful and enlightening on our strengths and weaknesses. Also we are very proud having reached over 200 views of our film on YouTube!