'Intrusion' Draft #1- Initial Feedback and Responses from Peers and Teacher

After an initial screening of our first draft of our main texts to our peers, I have gotten some strengths and improvements for my first draft of my short film. I found this to be useful to me to quite an extent, as I now have a good idea of what people liked about my short film and also what needed changing or removing.

Some of the common strengths in my first draft were:

- Good use of ambient music. This is something I'm happy with and agree with due to the fact that I thought the piece of score was effective and appropriate for my short film. It was also something  I felt was a highlight in my video so far, so I'm pleased that people found it was good and well selected.

- Good editing. People liked the style of editing and thought the edits between the tripod footage and the handheld footage was good and served a real purpose. The purpose being the handheld footage was from the point of view of the thief's, making it look more gritty and realistic. This was why I used differing camera shot types and am glad people liked the different uses of them and thought it was effective.

- Several people liked the in and out focus of the first shot, as well as the fade in from black. They thought it was successful in achieving an ambient opening to the film; as well as swiftly establishing the setting.  They also thought it added to the suspense of the short film.

- Clever uses of lighting. I think people thought the way I was able to balance lighting with colour correction was well done and it achieves a suitable, respectable look. It makes my colour pallet look dark and low-key lighting but still has a fairly day-time esque colour pallet simultaneously.

- People also are beginning to like the narrative, despite it being only the first half of my short film. I am pleased with this as there is no dialogue in my short film as of yet, so it's good that people deciphering the narrative and plot just by the camera shots and the actions of the characters.

However they also had some weaknesses with my first draft.

- One significant, or more picked up than anything else weakness with my first draft short film is that the non-diegetic audio became repetitive, or made people lose slight interest in the film. This is something that surprised me and made me think twice about how I should go about audio in my product, so now I know in my 2nd draft when all shooting is complete, to have a range of audio types and be sure to change things up a bit, making a mixture of both diegetic audio and non-diegetic. This will keep things interesting for the audience and not have them be slightly put off by only hearing one piece and type of audio soundtrack like in my first draft currently.

- Some people found pacing to be an issue- whether shots went on for too long or some shots in general were't needed, which ultimately dragged out my short film or made it longer than it needed to be, also making it less effective. This is something I'll be sure to change in my 2nd draft round and will pay closer attention to shots that aren't 100% needed, and any ways I can speed up footage or takes.

- Some people found lighting to be an issue- whereas this is something I slightly disagree with. I most likely will just edit my colour correction more next time so that the colours are not as dark and low-key, and be sure to have slightly brighter and more colorful images.