FICTION ADAPTATION: Rough Cut Viewing and Feedback

Today I Mike viewed the rough cut of my shoot. This rough cut was only an assembly of the shots I got with a little bit of colour work done, a few of the more technical pieces experimented with and very minimal sound design. I wanted to show a rough idea of what I meant by Ellie (the girlfriend) flickering in and out of shot - so I did this slightly more technical bit of editing ready for the rough cut - however, I plan to improve the quality of these pieces for my fine cut. Again, I did do some colouring on my rough cut to ensure all the shots matched to give my piece a sense of continuity, but this will be improved for my fine cut.

Mike's feedback was generally very positive. His points included:

- the adaptation follows my proposal and achieves what I set out to do
- it may be a better idea to overlap the audio (voicemail recording from the girlfriend at the beginning) with the visual shots of the boyfriend looking at the clock. At the moment it feels a bit separated into audio then visual. This could be because I haven't done the work on the sound design for the rest of the piece but I am more than happy to take this piece of advise on board and implement it in my work.
- 'call to action' - when the boyfriend finds the flower on the doormat it needs to be made more clear that it has been posted through the letter box or placed there. The audience need to know why he's on the journey.
- clarify what the boyfriend is seeing or not seeing. When he loses sight of her at the end of the piece, show the empty lane instead of him obscuring the vision.
- after clarifying what the camera is seeing - then go for the strangeness / wobbliness. At the moment the audience is unclear as to why the character feels a bit wobbly, however, if they see the empty lane in front of the character they will know it is because he has lost sight of her.
- it may be a nice idea to clarify the theme of the piece at the end with either a piece of text from the sonnet or a piece of spoken word from the sonnet. This follow what Lajos Egri, the author of The Art of Dramatic Writing, said; show then tell. Show the audience the story and then tell them at the end to clarify the narrative.

I will use Mike's feedback and advice to improve my work.

Here's the rough cut: