Evaluation by James Ackroyd

As all of the sound on the extract is effects and music, every piece of sound has been put there for a reason. The sounds were edited and placed along with the video using Final Cut (shown Below).

I made the music to suit what the extract needed using Garage Band and mixing different styles to make it how I wanted.

Our film mixes comedy, action and romance. In the extract it is more just comedy and action genres being used, these genres are the reason for the sound effects and music used and with out them the extract would lose purpose and wouldn’t work.

In the first bit of the extract the action genre is being pulled on, we used Mr and Mrs Smith (Doug Liman 2005) as an influence. With fast edgy music when Miriam is shown for the first time this makes tension and creates an action atmosphere. This music breaks a peaceful scene of sound of wind and birds; this brings in the action genre with quick changes of mood to fast pace and uncertainty of what’s happening next.

I decided to use voiceovers to replace the speech on the video because of the bad quality and to get it how it how I wanted it. We used actors outside our filming group so we only had one chance to do voiceovers that where realistic so after we did them we couldn’t change them and I think a few could have been done better but we had to do with what we got. Also we couldn’t get one of the actors to come in and do voiceovers so I had to do his voice for the extract and if you look carefully I think you can tell its not the voice of the actor talking.

Sound effects of wind and bird sounds run through most of the extract, because the sound effects weren’t long enough for the whole piece I repeated them. With the wind it’s not noticeable but if listened to carefully the bird sounds can be noticed that they are repeating. Also when watching the video back now I think the wind sound effect is too loud and although being there to create an atmosphere destroys it at the same time because of the overpowering loudness of it.

Of Originally the chase scene was going to be action as well but we thought it would look better to add in some comedy after some comments when we got other people to watch our extract. We changed the whole aim for the genre just by changing the music for the chase scene. I think this worked well in some ways because as the aim of our movie was to combine three different genres and in our extract it was a good idea to show at least two of these. But as we only made this change late on in the project the transition between action and comedy hasn’t worked as well as planned, it also makes the viewer unsure about the genre of the extract. The original music for the chase scene was a typical, high tempo action sequence soundtrack but as our test audience told us it didn’t really fit with the pictures being shown as they had more of a comical affect. To help the change I also added a voiceover and a comical scream.

Another thing that I would have changed if I could go back now would be to add more gate sounds when they are crossing the railway on the first gate. This way it would have made the railway crossing feel more realistic as the gates looked the same you would have expected them to sound the same.

I think our group worked well but some people contributed more than others. The final piece was good but I think it could be improved further but we don’t have anymore time.