Film Opening: Feedbacks

Throughout the process of production, we received a lot of comments and feedback from Mr Nick as well as from each other. In this blog spot, I will compile the comments we received. One was taken from Maxi’s blog while the others are written by me (Nay).

This will start from the first draft video play.

Note: I will refer to our editor as Timo and our young Hazel as Timothy.

3rd March (First Draft) written by: Maxi

Timo had finished the first draft of the film and from that, we as a team gave feedback along with our teacher Mr Nick. Some scenes needed a bit of pace-changing, including the credits scene, and some transitions. Timo also experimented with adding a filter in the first shot, which made it look like it was shot from an old film camera. We decided this looked unprofessional, and told him to change it. Some scenes like the teacher telling Hazel to stop playing the piano also needed to be edited as he was meant to be initially out of focus, and then move into focus, which Timo hadn't done yet. As well as when the teacher starts the class, the ambient noise of students talking in the background suddenly disappeared, which we told him to keep - but just slowly fade out as the teacher keeps talking. Some lines were also cut out, including Harmony's "I love going to parks, reading books..." line, which we all agreed should be included to better the overall flow of the opening.  Hopefully, by the next draft, all these issues will be mitigated.

9th March (Second Draft) written by: Nay

Timo finished the second draft after editing to match the feedback given from the first draft. Both Mr Nick and the team gave more feedback and comments to ensure top quality. Mr Nick suggested getting rid of black screens between Hazel sitting down and Mr Ben standing up as in his opinion it doesn’t work well so Timo will experiment on that to see what is best. For Hazel’s head-turning part, we caught on a small time detail that messes up the continuation hence Timo will have to push back some scenes by a few seconds to improve the continuity. We also realized for the mother scene at the beginning, the audio is very loud so he will have to change the audio level for Ms Lala’s scenes. The lighting in some of the teacher’s scene is also very white and cool which contrast with the warm tone of other scenes so to fix that, Timo will attempt to color grade Mr Ben. During the names of actors, the text of Timothy Mulia is not right as it got cut off so he will have to fix up the text alignment for Timothy Mulia.

30th March (Final Video) written by: Nay

As we posted the final opening on YouTube, there were a lot of comments we received from Mr Nick. Through our discussion and re-watch, we found that the audio for home scenes was a bit messy because of the birds so we might have to do an audio reshoot to fix that issue or an alternative to trim between audios to match it up. The text alignment of the actors can also be fixed to be more in. The flow between the book open and close cut also wasn't well so Timo might have to experiment with that. The sound volume level also needed to be fixed; all school scenes were too loud, the piano scene in school was too loud, the dialogue of "yea sorry" was too loud, the footsteps effect was too loud, second Hazel dialogue when the teacher calls out was too loud as well. The background noise in school scenes also needed to be erased; cut it when the teacher shout (dead silent then when he walks to his seat fades in sound), and erase it when the teacher calls Harmony to walk in. The brightness when teen Hazel close-up scene when Harmony talks should also be tone down.