EVALUATION - THE LIFE OF HANDS. (DepicT! Project)

Here I have embedded our final video for the DepicT! competition. Music courtesy of Incompetech website.

I admit I'm not 100% happy with the outcome, mostly because after finishing it & uploading it all, I have found a lot of errors within the video & never liked the whole idea in the first place. We first came up with an idea about Hands and maybe showing everyday life as a Hand to which Sean had said that he wanted a basic story line, so the audience can follow it & remain captivated. He came up with adding a love story within the two main characters & overcoming an obstacle like your usual, average, love story. The whole production process was infuriating as we kept missing our own deadlines that we had set ourselves & spent a lot more time filming than editing which is where our main errors were established & maybe could have been fixed. Maybe.

Our video begins introducing exactly what we were going to do and show, with a hand simply walking across the shot, cutting into the Inter-title & title of the piece The Life of Hands. 

Mise-en-scene was one of our main components that we had focused on when creating our project. I had wrote a basic Prop List with the Disco Ball, setting the scene of our characters. We also thought about having a Backdrop (Blue Screen) leaning against the wall, because our classroom wall is very bright & wouldn't look right within the scene. We had thought about all the practicalities within most of the scenes to make sure that it looked the best, this includes thinking about the Props, Lighting, Backdrop. One of our peers feedback in class, Lauren Kellett said she loved the way we had used the Space well & the composition was good. The only problem we faced for the lighting was because we filmed on two different days, one day was lighter than the other & you couldn't actually see Dave, our aggressor, stab Andy. 




A lot of our errors stemmed from our Editing which was our main feedback from our peers. I agree with all of them & had picked up on them all re-watching it after the deadline. I feel like we could have completed it if we were given a little more time & we didn't have a Half Term in between our Pre-Production Process and Shooting. We had already had a flexible deadline & I did not want to take the chance on missing the main deadline. Our Audio was extremely shaky due to turning up the volume on the Voice Overs which led to the audio sounding extremely crackly & disorientated, we did this so you could hear the dialogue & follow the story line over the Disco music. For our next project, or if we ever need to do that again, I will learn from this mistake. This is also because we had to add the voice overs in, as we did not do the dialogue when we were filming. There were a lot of Continuity errors, some examples are:

• One day, we had the Disco lights darker than the other day which showed up on our video.
• The day that Ed wasn't here, we didn't draw a wound on Andy after he had been stabbed but the last day of filming, we had a wound, which also can be figured out if someone payed close attention.
• Andy's eyes are further apart for a few scenes
• A lot of the framing doesn't look good on shot, so we've had to scale it which puts down the quality of the shot.
• A lot of the Jump Cuts don't match.

Sean said that we should have used a Fade in/Dissolve showing that time had passed during the romantic field/meadow scene. 

I'll admit, I copied that over from my Production Diary. We also received another Continuity error from the scene where we are first establishing Mandy when she waves at Andy, her "legs" are closed then it cuts over to her dancing and her "legs" are open. I didn't actually realise this error but I agree with it & wish we could have re-shot it.

We didn't use any Camera Movements, any panning/tracking/tilting etc. Our Camerawork remained very static, with just cut transitions & only one Fade Up after the intertitle. Sean, our teacher, told us that some of our shots were out of focus & it was essential that during our piece, we should have always used Manual Focus, which we started off doing but then forgot about. I agree with his point & wish that we did it for every scene. We also had a problem with Framing. Ed filmed some of the shots where Mandy & Andy were outside (which is where the main focus problem was) & we could see Ellie's body in the background, so we had to zoom into the shot, losing most of the quality. 

We had also used a lot of POV Shot's/Reaction Shots. This helped with the story line & the emotional attachment as we could see how the characters were feeling throughout the time lapse. This was also shown by changing Andy's face regularly.

Our Sound was also very simple. Using Soundtracks from the Incompetech website. Ed obtained the music with the help from Sean & I'm not 100% how he did it. Our dialogue was added in after we had filmed using a Microphone. When doing that we didn't really speak loudly or clearly enough to here over the Soundtrack, so we had to turn it up on Premiere Pro which completely distorted the piece & ruined it. Sean also said it would have been better to add some more music or an effect for when Ed walked into the scene, revealing that it was just Ellie & Andy messing around. 

The feedback was helpful with both constructive feedback & positive feedback, from all I have learnt how to improve. I especially liked Duncan Whyte's feedback as he was able to pick up on what we had wanted. "Fantastic idea! I liked the emotion attachment with just hands". More feedback included that we had an "interesting idea" & that it was "interesting & unusual to have main characters as hands, but it worked". 

I admit, I didn't like this project because of this idea & the amount of times we had missed a few deadlines as tat is something I did not want but at the same time I have learnt from the mistakes we had made & I look forward to creating more projects which are hopefully never going to involve hands again.