A rough cut is a stage in a film where the film starts to resemble the final product. We showed our rough cut to a large audience of roughly 50 people on March 4, 2021.
Here is our rough cut:
During the rough cut showing, we asked the audience members to fill out a questionnaire. Around 46 of them answered. The questions were all on a scale of 1 to 10, and we allowed people to write down specific comments at the end.The questions are as follows:
Did you like the production/studio company logo?
Did you like the title sequence: credits and titles?
Did you like the film name?
Did the opening make you want to keep watching?
How would you rate the quality of filming?
How would you rate the quality of editing?
Did the opening make sense? Why/Why Not?
Below are the average answers for each question.
On average, most of our answers range from 6 to 7. When answers are absent for a specific question, we filled it in with the most common answer, that being 7. I honestly think the praise was a bit too high, but I might just be too hard on myself.
Here are our comments received:
- Audio not clear - Sound quality - Mrs. Byrne liked the hand shots. - I would make voices clear - audio problem - jumpy, Sound wasn’t clear, Too many chiefs?
- An excellent start - well done - narrative not clear - language is unclear - context - fluidity of production - I like the storyline! - it would be better if editing are more smooth and continuity. - Lighting is a bit too dark. - Very bad voice recording and transition, not smooth - Interesting plot, special effects - can't see screen - Sound quality need to improve
Many of the comments revolve around the sound, which was very bad due to the setup of the microphone. The frequency of the mic was too high, as we wanted to pick up dialogue clearly. However, this lead to excessive noise, but we added a noise reduction effect through Premiere Pro. This wasn't enough to save the rough cut, though. There was also a lack of background music, which intensified the feeling of excessive noise.
We also had issues with the lighting, as I have elaborated in the previous blogpost. We did not have the time to film before the sun went down, so we had to improvise while editing. Directional lighting was added as a result to make the whole thing brighter. However, this sacrificed quality, as the footage afterwards looked grainy, for visibility.
The lighting issue also came into play with the laptop, whose screen cannot be seen due to the excessively dark lighting. This was fixed through close tracking done frame-by-frame after the rough cut was premiered, which was a tedious process for everyone involved.
Music was one of the biggest problems in my opinion. In the rough cut, the only music used was at the end, in the form of Where Is My Mind by the Pixies, which I think was an example of horrible taste that did not go well with the movie at all. The lack of music in the earlier part of the opening only makes it more jarring, as well as intensifying the sound of the background noise. Instead, I argued that we should use Asian jazz. I suggested two songs - Raven Speaks by Jiro Inagaki and Rush from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack.
The overall response to the rough cut was that people thought it was mediocre to decent, with special emphasis placed on how bad the sound was. We are aiming to improve all this in the final cut with the improvements described above as well as with possible others.
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