Rough Cut - Miss Miler

A rough cut is important to consider when filming a thriller as it gives you a chance to share your work with others to gain constructive criticism from them in order to help give you more chance to improve your opening sequence. The rough cut should be similar to the final cut so that the audience can give their opinions in a fair manner. If I was to make a thriller opening, to submit my work without doing a rough cut, then the clip may not show its full potential, and show the progression we have made as a group when filming and editing our opening sequence.

Audience feedback is very important to consider when presenting our rough cut, as it gives us a chance to get an honest and un-biast opinion on our opening sequence. They can give you productive criticism to help you improve on elements that may not be working, but also tell you what parts are not as effective, so that you can improve on them, or simply make sure you keep them or keep them out of the sequence.

After presenting our rough cut and receiving feedback, my group and I created a presentation, which we showed to our class in which it allowed them to get a better understanding of our clip, so they would be able to give us some more constructive feedback. The presentation included;

• What our group narrative was
• How we came to a conclusion of the narrative
• What our final narrative was
• Our individual narratives with the positives and negatives
• What we wanted to create. + How we think we have created it.
• How is it conventional to a thriller genre

We then showed our class our rough cut of our thriller sequence, which we had previously exported to YouTube, allowing the option of 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.
• Good suspense building – conventional/audience scared
• Good use of characters – relating to the audience

Our weaknesses included;

• Not enough credits – not enough names used e.g – music co-ordinator/screenplay
• Same use of colour in credits – needs to be change/mixed up/diferent varieties
• Music the same throughout – needs to have iconic changes

When thinking about how we could improve each of these weaknesses, we decided that we would make some changes. We decided to change the music when we want the scene to become more dramatic, in our case when the girl is running away from the villain, we made the music more sinister and faster to emphasise the situation and her heartbeat. We made sure the credit were more eary and were in different positions when coming onto the screen by including fades and blurs which we already of I some of the credits.
The weakness of there not being enough credits and then having the same constant colouring of them is a fair comment, simply because we had not finished/finalised 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.

This feedback will help me with finalising my final thriller opening sequence, as it has given me and my group ideas as to how to improve our clip. We now have an understanding of how the audience will react and can hopefully adjust and change certain elements to help make our thriller opening sequence the most effective it can be.