Evaluation Question 7: What have you learnt from your preliminary task to the completion of your final piece?

I can say that I have definitely learnt a great deal from my time on this course since my preliminary task was created.

For starters, My continuity is much cleaner than it once was and I believe that I have learnt to properly identify where a continuity error has arose, as such the most notable use of this was my choice to cover up an error found in the characters placement between scenes with a line about an anonymous phone call leading to another shot of a phone booth. As you can see I mapped out what the problem was once I noticed it to illustrate the problem to my partner and we came up with this solution together as a team. This is quite a strong contrast to my old lazy attitude to continuity editing from my preliminary task, for example, in my original piece me and my original partner decided that it would be interesting to have a foot level shot of the character walking past, however, it didn't go as planned, we didn't actually notice the problem at first until it was pointed out to use by another individual. Originally we had the character walk from one scene to another, which was simple enough, however, we accidentally broke the 180 Degree rule to its greatest extent as the character walked to the left and emerged from the right, breaking the understandable flow of movement. To fix this issue we simply flipped the first frame but it could have been a lot worse if we were near a sign or something else where this would have been easier to see.

In realistic terms, this makes doesn't fit in with the
context of the story

Secondly, I believe my skills as a script writer have improved to some degree, I believe that I am getting better with the way I wish to show characters attitudes in film as my preliminary task was somewhat lacking in focus, indeed, the characters seemed very over the top and indeed very cliche, for example, the ending to the film itself is the main character turning to the camera and snapping his fingers to enter the title sequence, while it may have looked cool at the time it doesn't make any contextual sense and thereby makes it so that the entire piece is no longer believable, realistic and by that aspect absolutely pointless. In 'False Impression' we kept a much cleaner script with simple realistic dialogue moments where possible, we kept the dialogue realistic, occasionally delving into a bit of mild humor.

Scene Creation was a wonderful experience for
me and my team

I believe that I have developed a more creative sense of mind during the editing of these pieces, the most prominent of course being a new found trust in certain canned tools like warp stabilizers and the use of new and varied fades and dips, my original piece just stayed as a simple cut to cut style and it suffered greatly because of this. In connection to this I think that I have been a lot more creative in general camera use and certain effects, most prominently in this aspect are my use of Lighting, my low angle shots and my new found use of a moving shot as well as a stronger use of pans to really mix the piece up a bit to make it more exciting and interesting to view.

Indeed some of my most important things that I have learned stem from my having to work with a partner on this piece, In this sense, compromise and understanding have been a strong part in my learning cycle as I have gotten to know my partners style and genre skill just as they have learned mine.

I believe I have amassed a good bit of experience in this course which I hope to exercise entirely in the A2 Course greatly.

Evaluation Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

There are of course a number of things that I believe I have learnt during my time constructing this product, Firstly I would like to talk about what you can't see in the final piece before moving on.

Firstly, I have began to use a number of different media outlets as well as having planned to use certain ones in my evaluation. One of these particular outlets was of course Podbean, Podbean allows its users to create their own podcasts with ease as well as having a free reasonable 50MB of storage which was useful. On the other hand, I have also been given the opportunity to use Prezi Presentation software after it was recommended to me by my partner, and whose use in our Product Presentation was indeed useful.


Moving onto to technology that directly affected the content of the film, I have been utilizing the Full Adobe CS6 package frequently in order to achieve a number of interesting effects and fixes in our piece. Most prominently featured in our piece is the Film Dissolve effect between cuts, which fades the scene from the darkest parts first, then the lightest, giving it a very 'Cinematic' effect. The original piece we constructed had a number of shaky camera shots, but you'll notice that in fact the shots are actually rather smooth, this is because we utilized Premiere Pro's Warp Stabilizer tool in order to blend frames in a way that gives a much smoother movement instead of a shaky appearance which looks awfully amateur.

In terms of Hardware and tools we had a number of special items at our disposal, The most obvious being tripods but we also extended our scene's stylized look with some additional tools. One tool Being our Opteka X-Grip Portable Stabilizer which helped to reduce the shakiness before we finished the touch up with the Warp Stabilizer tool. Another key player in our film equipment was our use of a 160 Bulb Stage Lighting piece, It allowed us to brighten up key areas that were just too dark or unsuitable to work with, The Opteka stand also had a built in tool to allow it be attached. We accompanied the light with an orange filter to match the lighting coming from the orange drapes in the room. Finally, we have our final piece, I had managed to get a hold of a Blue Snowball Desk Microphone in order to do the voice over for the end scene, the clearer sound quality makes it more understandable and without it, we would have had to use a much lesser graded mic.

video001 from David Smith on Vimeo.

In general, I have learnt a great deal about technologies, I believe that they can be used to both enhance a piece but also stylize it properly, How you use technology can be a real saving grace at points and while I may be sad to see Analogue equipment being used less and less I can still really get behind the new technology of today, In the future I hope to use a number of different pieces of tech that interest me including green screen effects and possibly even tracks for moving shots.

False Impressions Equipment from David Smith on Vimeo.

Evaluation Question 4 and 5: Who would be the audience for your media product? How would you attract/adress them?

video005 from David Smith on Vimeo.

Evaluation Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Evaluation Question 1 : How does your piece use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Originally during the construction and planning of our piece we considered a wide variety of ideas, quite a lot of these ideas were direct influences from films including roles, setting choices and style. Other ideas used were created by me and my partner to tailor the piece more to our own styles.

The most notable use of existing conventions we could find in our piece was the idea to set the story around the detectives as found in many films in the Crime/Thriller genre including more recent films like 'Red Dragon' (2002) but also extending back down the line to films like 'Donnie Brasco' (1997) and 'Serpico' (1973). 

Serpico (1973) 

Once we had decided on a concept fully however we decided that we would actually prefer to have two main detectives, the main inspiration of this of course being David Fincher's 'Se7en' (1995) because of the strong and always interesting conflicts and relations between the two characters and how the audience can get a sense of enjoyment in watching these two connect over time, witness the struggles they face as a team rather than being individuals and truly understand how this case stumps even the mind of an experienced official, never mind a new one. Essentially this is also the grounds for our choice of dialogue between the two as we thought that it would be important to ground in the fact that these two have a strong bond, hence the light humour found in lines such as "You must be Cross" "You would be too, sir".

Other Films that also inspired our choice for two detectives include films such as 'Pulp Fiction' and 'The French Connection' for notable mentions, yet 'Se7en' had the strongest influence for this setup out of all of these choices.

However, while we may have taken the concept of having two detectives from 'Se7en' we deviated from it in some pretty strong ways. For Example, in 'Se7en' the two detectives meet together yet it is Brad Pitt's younger character that is seen first and indeed acts as the main character overall, Morgan Freeman's character tends to act more as an moral conscience to Pitt's actions. In our film we switched this concept to some degree as the first person we properly focus on is the older detective because we believed his role as an elder granted him much more respect. In this aspect we can express how the underlying theme of our film is the concept of Age and how being a young spry individual does not necessary make you more capable in matters of the mind. In addition to this the final use of 'Se7en' as an existing convention was the visuals, we really wanted to make our crime scene seem dark and dingy as well as having our victims on display to some degree though we left out the proper reveal of the body to the opening credits to make sure that the audience was really seeing what was happening.

The Crime Scene itself was something that we really wanted to develop to make a little more Realistic, with ample opportunities for the audience to really understand what was happening, hence my partners suggestions of adding in a series of shots of the crime scene to use as a title sequence, something that I had already been fairly interested in doing from the start because of that methods exceptionally interesting use in the film ‘Red Dragon’ which I had researched closely before the films production. I felt that it really helped establish the situation and also add additional context to the issue that wasn’t necessarily found or shown in the piece prior to the credits. 

Our Film generally likes to stick to the safe guide rails in terms of conventions to potentially follow a more safer and successful role amongst other product, However, we have still expressed some creativity through a wide variety of creative shot styles and little dialogue quirks to make it more stylized.

Interview With Writer and Cinematographer of 'False Impressions'

Writer and Cinematographer Interview from David Smith on Vimeo.

For part of our course we were required to take part in an interview for our piece, in said interview we discussed a number of issues about our piece and some of the tones and conventions based it on aswell as out opinions on a number of issues.