Due to issues with technology I have had to type up my personal commentary. I have also added the link to Mr Earl's blog to the interview that me and Hannah did about our video.

Personal Commentary

I feel that overall our final project was a success. It isn’t perfect but I feel like we did an excellent job given the problems, technology issues and lack of time that we were given. I felt like Alex as an actor did a wonderful job especially as I wasn’t too good under pressure and the weather was atrocious and under normal circumstances it would be completely inappropriate to go out in a dress. She froze for 3 full days and had to run over and over again for every shot and retake we did but didn’t complain once and we are extremely grateful to her for being such a good sport. I found that because the music was fast paced it fitted in well with the video. Edward wasn’t given much time to think of anything to compose so we’re grateful that he too worked well under pressure. Although we worked really hard and put in a lot of effort into editing, we couldn’t really do much about the shaky camera work and if we were to do it again, we would definitely use either a different camera man or use different angles to ensure that the camera did not shake. I thought that the use of various camera angles increased the verisimilitude of the video and engaged the audience more as it meant the video was more interesting and didn’t just use mundane techniques. I definitely think that we gained the effect that we wanted by not showing the killers face as it didn’t make it obvious what was going on and it left the audience wanting to know more and asking questions. It left an air of mystery about it and also built up a lot of suspense which was the effect we were after. The point of view scene was effective as it built up tension and I feel like it would leave the audience on the edge of their seats almost holding their breath. Our use of the colour change and the transition between the two time periods was shaky and could have been vastly improved given the time as the wall looked false and it almost didn’t match the colours of the rest of the scene. Saying this I think that the sound effect and the flash put together created the sci-fi effect that we wanted. There could have been less footage of our actors feet and I felt it got a bit repetitive after a while but the music in this half of the sequence and the special effect that Hannah put on the 360 degree turn were very useful in creating the sense of confusion that we hoped to achieve and made the audience aware that our main character was not in a world that she was familiar with. The acting from me wasn’t exactly Oscar winning and we could have really done with re filming the last couple of scenes to improve the sound and quality of our video. The scene where our character see’s the date could have been improved as her reaction didn’t change but I really liked how our actress presented forward confusion and panic.  I think that throughout the video we needed to improve a lot on the smoothness of the camera work. The tripod could have been loosened up a little so that the camera man could have turned the camera with ease rather than having jerky camera movements. I think that in the scene where she is in the crowd we could have focussed on Alex a lot more and still have given the sense that she was lost in the crowd and we could have also focussed more on the shots of the conversation so that no heads were cut out and we could have made the conversation sequence a shot-reverse shot sequence rather than all one scene.  Overall I feel like our video was a success but it could have still been vastly improved with a bit of re filming to improve the audio and better acting on my behalf.
I’d like to give thanks to Alex Toes, James Stephenson, Edward Fawcett and Mr Earl for their patience and contribution to mine and Hannah’s video. They all did a wonderful job and we couldn’t have done this without them.



Link to Mr Earl's blog - http://vimeo.com/22188579