evaluation for childrens drama: 'Pirates lost in time'

Evaluation for Children’s Drama: - ‘pirates lost in time’

Units covered:                   UNIT 16 – film and video editing techniques

Introduction:                        I have completed my 5 minute Children’s drama video production (pirates lost in time), and undertaken sound and visual editing for Features for Broadcasting. I have gained an insight into editing techniques, and developed my own skills. Editing doesn’t happen by accident; each cut or transition follows decision making and evaluation.

Context:                                With reference to my completed productions, I will evaluate the editing process. 

Evaluations Report:            

The key decisions I made for shots/scenes that were included/discarded and why.

                                                At first we decided to base our drama around pirates and aliens – and relate to the target audience in a positive way of helping others. Then we finished filming our first draft of the film and decided to discard the idea of pirates and aliens. For instance we didn’t like how the title related to the drama (pirates vs. aliens) because the groups of characters were not ‘against’ each other which the title may suggest to the audience. Also we didn’t like the quality of our film as the locations affected the sound quality. Also we felt it didn’t express our ideas and creative flair for the drama. For this film I directed.

Our second idea consisted of time travelling pirates who stumble into the 21^st century. They help a young man who has fallen out with his friends and needs help to find his way home.

After filming we watched the footage and realised it lacked a variety of shots and angles. So once again we decided to shoot it again…finally we have a final outcome which is yet to be finished, yet again there is a problem as we have realised the director has not pressed the record button correctly. But we managed to avert this minor predicament and use slightly more dissatisfactory scenes which we had to do more in depth editing such as cropping and adjusting image quality.

The cuts, transitions and effects used and what effect we were aiming to create.

In our final cut of the film we decided to use quite simple cuts because there were not particularly dramatic events that are why there was no need for dramatic cuts and effects. Except for our title sequence which we used an image editor and special effect which created a lighting effect for the ‘time travel’ part – which establishes to the audience what the show consists off. We were trying to create a dramatic impact for the audience and grasp their attention. Transition wise again we used quite simple ones such as; fade out, swipe etc we used fade out as a time passing element.

The work process – how did we organise our clips to help us edit effectively.

We wrote what order our clips were in while filming so we knew what went where when we exported them onto the hardrive.  We also looked through all of our clips and decided what we wanted to use and discard we renamed the ones we wanted to keep before we transported them onto the editing software (premire pro).  We also kept referring back to the script just to double check it was in the order we intended. When we finished editing one part we always watched it back to make sure it was correct and flowed correctly with the other clips.

The success/unsuccessful final project – my opinion.

I found that if we filmed where we was first intended to film, everything would of gone swimmingly,  because of the first problem of the sound quality. If we never had the first problem the following problems would not of occurred.

I felt like our plot and story wasn’t very understandable to the unaware audience. We should of all gone through the script and story boards together and also ask peers outside of our group for their opinion before continuing with the idea..

What I thought did go well was the first draft of the film as the angels and shots where appropriate and affective.

Finally in my opinion I thought 90% of the film was a complete catastrophe, due the fact that we were unorganaised and took a rather laid back attitude towards to the project.

The skills I developed along the way.

I progressed with my editing skills and being more confident using the premeir pro software. I also  learnt to prepare myself and my group for what needs to be done and to be more organised.