Seminar Group Screening Feedback

Notes taken of feedback from peers

The other day we had a mock presentation and screening of our experimental film in it's 'final' form. Our film had been exported wrong to start with so we had to re export it to get it to work properly, and since that was rushed we had to show a version without the last 20 secs. Nevertheless the feedback from our group and was overwhelmingly positive, which was really nice to hear. Since we'd watched it again and again in the editing process we were getting quite bored of it and personally I was starting to doubt it because you start to pick out the negatives more. However hearing all the positive comments re-established my feelings for the piece and re kindled my liking it and I noticed the positives a lot more.

The majority of the comments were praising the shots and the editing. They liked the idea of natural window framing and a lot of people picked up on how the visuals fitted with the soundtrack very nicely and smoothly, this shows we managed to fit to the idea of it syncing as I hoped . There was multiple comments on the framing of the shots and how they picked up the aura of the location very well, in particular the shot of the graffiti'd woman looking our the window at the train.

One of the people that had heard our first draft of the audio praised how much better we made it too which again was nice to hear because it was hard starting completely again from scratch. It helped to hear that others felt the way we did that we had 100% improved our original version, this one is much more immersive and a lot creepier.

There was also a lot of praise about the use of the location and it sparked discussion about where it was as it was such an interesting place to go and a few other people wanted to go there to look at and use the same place. This was nice because it meant we were able to share this knowledge with our peers and friends so that we can all benefit from a location as good as this one.

A couple of people said it made them feel uneasy and unpleasant which was great news as that was our main goal as I've mentioned many times in this blog. Another comment was they got a feeling of intensity from the piece that there was a real effect from this location. One of the more passionate comments likened the film to Jaws and The Shining in the way we sort of showed not a lot but got across so much feeling through how we did assemble it. This obviously is almost an honour to have our work remind someone of those two great films and was one of my favourite responses.

One person likened the piece to the short film Inbindable Volume, which was nice since obviously I've analysed aspects on here and said we will try to emulate the idea of that film, its nice to know that was noticed. We had a comment on how the split screens gave nice movement to it, which again is good because that's what I said I liked and really wanted to emulate in my Inbindable Volume analysis, so knowing we did that successfully is nice.

The comments were so positive we're going to keep the edit the way it was when we showed it then and not do any more work to it, since we feel like we would be over doing it and we can't improve on it beyond what we already have, in our opinion.