Focus Group

During this focus group, our media class analysed each other's preliminary videos and gave examples of successful attributes and suggested ways to improve, hopefully helping me improve my film and editing skills for my future horror trailer. As well as this feedback, I designed a questionnaire for others to complete, giving me a wide range of constructive criticism. The majority of this was positive and any negative comments given will be used positively when creating my final product.

What I learnt from this focus group is that my transitions needed to be smoother. I was aware of this myself in a particular part of the clip especially, but I found that the way to overcome the issue of my first tracking shot being too long was to cut it. However, watching this back with my peers, I have realised that this wasn't the best change I could have made as it was very noticeable to those reflecting on my work as one clip dramatically jumped to the next. Although throughout the remainder of my clip, the transitions worked very well and produced a smooth, professional finish.  


One improvement I would like to make myself, is the sound quality. Personally I believe it would be easier to record the sound separately from the camera shots. This way I can ensure that there is no background noise (such as the wind, sounds of people or animals)  seeing as I filmed my preliminary task outside. However saying this, within my horror trailer, I do not plan to have much dialogue as I don't think it fits within the conventions of horror so hopefully I won't have this issue for my final product. Another way I could have overcome the poor sound quality was to use an outdoors furry microphone cover as it only captures sound that is in front of the microphone and blocks out any background noise that I might have a issue with. 

One other feature that I would have liked to change is the dialogue because I made the mistake to only tell the actors on the day of filming this preliminary task what they would be doing. Therefore for my horror trailer I am planning to give the actors my storyboard beforehand so that they are roughly aware of what they would need to do. This way they can practise the dialogue (if used) to ensure the conversation sounds natural because within my clip, peers mentioned that there was a gap after each camera- shot- change, I would definitely like to change this because I want to give the impression that the entirety of the clip was filmed in one take. This will help the clip look more professional on a whole and will portray the use of editing and film skills. 

There were some positive comments made about my preliminary video, one of which being that my camera angles complimented the dialogue used by the actors. I tried to vary my camera angles as much as I could but I think from completing this preliminary task, the three camera shots that worked best for me was the tracking shot, the two shot and the over- the- shoulder shot. They allow for the audience to see the actors body language and facial expressions, which I believe to be an important feature within a horror film, to ensure I portray the typical horror conventions.