Evaluation-Sophie Alard

I am pleased with the work that we have produced as a group. Our film extract is largely influenced by the narrative of Mr and Mrs Smith, (Doug Liman 2005). We liked the idea of the couple, where they at first do not know they have to kill each other, but then have a massive fight and ruin their house. We tried to portray something similar into our extract, of a couple who had broke up in the past due to the woman’s medical issues (mentally disabled), who finds that her ex is in another relationship, so she attempts to kill them both. We also had other ideas such as an opening of a gangster film which would have worked just as well but as a group we thought it would be better to do the first idea as the gangster opening would be hard to get good actors who could make the extract look realistic.


My role in the group was to be the director. I felt like I needed to be the director in order to keep the group organised. My role included doing the story board for the group and other directing duties. For our extract, I wanted the clip to start calm and peaceful in order to contrast it with the following scenes. We did this by using diegetic sound such as birds singing in the background and wind to build up the atmospheric environment and also to represent the calmness of the countryside. Also, the extract starts with a slow pan to establish the surroundings. I wanted it to be like this in order to give a false pretence that it is just an ordinary scene and also to shock the audience with the following scenes when the crazy girl jumps out of the bushes. Even though we had certain roles to do within the group, I felt that we all helped each other with our group roles.

We pretty much kept to our storyboard apart from a few changes we needed to change to keep the continuity and flow of each scene to the next, such as; we had two similar shots next to each other but in slightly different places due to moving the camera. We overcame this by using a different shot to cover over it which works just as good. Also another fault with our actors was that they didn’t react to a gunshot which is partly my fault seeing it was my duty as the director, we overcame this problem by adding a frame from a scene after it. However, we didn’t realise that the shot was the wrong way round, which meant the fence was on the wrong side. We could overcome this by easily flipping the image round.


We tried to make our scene serious, but after watching over it a couple of times, we realised that it was completely the opposite and in fact quite humorous. This was mainly due to the actors acting skills that we used as we noticed that during the chase scene towards the end, the guy closes the gate behind him in a very neat fashion, which just wouldn’t happen in a real life situation. However, after talking to Jake, he said it would be better to change the soundtrack for the chase scene to something more comical. We found his feedback very useful as it styled the way we ended our scene. The genre of the film extract ended up being an action/adventure/comedy.


One thing we could improve on is the chase scene; I think it would be better if we used quicker shots to build up the tension in the scene. We tried to do this, but we only had 3 different shots to play around with. First of all we those 3 shots and cut them in half and played around with the order in order to fasten up the pace. It would have been better if we included more close ups to show the emotions of the characters in the scene. However it was still slow and we thought if we did this again then that scene would be too repetitive. We want this scene to resemble something like Casino Royale (Martin Campbell 2006). We used similar shots like point of view shots and long shots to capture the intensity of the scene. This didn’t quite work out, as the actresses were laughing whilst being chase which ruins the serious atmosphere.


We used none of the original sound from the camera for our extract (folly), as the background noise sounded terrible against all the sound effects we put in. We deleted all these, and re-recorded the dialogue. We used many sound effects to build up the atmosphere, such as thunder which could represent something bad happening, a train noise to build tension as the couple run over the train track, which makes the audience think that there is a possibility of them getting run over. Also, the sound effect ‘Heavy Wind’ is used throughout the scene to make it sound realistic.