Rough cut- Miss Miller

A rough cut is important to consider within the final stages of completing our thriller opening as it gives our group a 'rough' idea about how our thriller opening is going and gives our peers a chance to review it, helping us to improve different areas that could be better and therefore achieve a better mark.

Audience feedback is a necessary party of our thriller opening evaluation as at the rough cut stage we are able to present what we have to our peers and give them a chance to give us criticism as to what we could improve on and tell us what we are doing well. From this outside member feedback we are able to make necessary changes to our thriller opening that we did not recognize. This will maximize our thriller openings effectiveness in conveying the desired conventions and effects of tension and suspense and as a result we will achieve a better mark.

We received our feedback through a group presentation prepared by Reggie Witham. It gave a brief explanation of our narrative and then went on to explain how effective some of the conventions used in our thriller opening, such as a female victim where in conveying the desired effects of venerability, tension and suspense. At the end of our presentation a YouTube video of our thriller opening rough cut is shown and this is what we receive our feedback from. Our rough cut can be seen in the video bellow.

On the whole our feedback from our rough cut was generally positive. We received great feedback on the use of the generic thriller conventions used throughout, including a blonde female victim, iconography including a knife, soundtrack and slow editing techniques. Our peers who assessed our work said we done an excellent job in achieving the effects of tension and suspense (generic themes to be explored in the thriller genre) through the use of these conventions, as they are so relatable to the thriller genre. We also received positive feedback on our editing skills that pieced together our thriller opening. Particularly the effect of 'Bad TV' used in coordination with the music that created an effect of confusion, danger and instability, which we hoped to relate that to our antagonist and according to our feedback, we done it well. However there were still parts that needed to be improved on. For example we did not incorporate our film title 'Phobia' into the opening credits which is a circumstantial flaw within our work that was must change. We also needed to make our film shorter by at least 20 seconds as it is over the two minute and ten second limit, our feedback showed the general trend that we should delete the scene with the girl texting her mum to adhere to the time limit as this scene took focus out of the tension and suspense within the narrative and severed no real purpose in our thriller opening.

The feedback we have received as a result of our group doing a presentation to our peers will help us in finalizing our thriller opening sequence as we are now aware of specific elements we need to change or put in to our work to make it as effective as possible in portraying the effects of tension and suspense, making it a conventional thriller opening, achieving full marks.