New Dress Code Segment- Critique

http://chs.smuhsd.org/bigue/art_of_video/index/fa11_news/fa11_dresscode.mov


Preproduction:

Ms. Shanks sitting down for interview

My partner and I came up with the idea by focusing on what would be interesting. Since the dress code is new, it would of been a good segment to inform the students of Capuchino and to show students/teachers opinions about the new dress code.

Camilla in different location and standing up

We thought that Ms. Shanks would be an important interviewee because she is the principal of the school and students should hear her opinion. We asked Ms. Ferro if she wanted to talk about the dress code, and she agreed. During first period I went around the cafeteria and asked for a sophomore to be interviewed. We wanted a sophomore than a freshmen to be interviewed because they knew what the old dress code was like last year.
I think that our interview questions were focused and direct because the interviewees stated their opinions and the rest of the segment was informal.

Production Quality:

Ms. Ferro's eyes are not looking at the camera

Our locations and background for each interviewee was different because we wanted different shots. One interviewee was near the cafeteria and the other was in front of the office. The students that were interviewed were standing up, and Mrs. Shanks and Ms. Ferro were sitting down.
The most difficult thing in production was getting b-roll. It was really hard trying to get b- roll because its not a topic that can be graphically seen all the time. So we had lots of photoshop pictures.

B- roll was shaky

The interview with Ms. Ferro wasn't that good because she is looking on the wrong side of the camera. Our b- roll was shaky because we did not use a tripod. We mostly got many pictures off the internet.
The lighting in our shots came out good, but the audio was off when we transferred the b-roll to final cut pro. But, Jenna fixed that problem. Some of the audio for Alec didn't come out well because of the construction noises.

Script:
My voice over introduced the story by saying the rules of the new dress code. Then I said "let's see what students and faculty think about the new dress code." I grabbed the audience's attention with the line written above. I think that our segment was informative because we explained the new dress code and had different opinions on the subject.
At first my voice over closer was pretty long. We had to cut up big chunks of it because of time. I wanted the audience to hear all of the voice over, but the parts that I said was good enough to close the segment. I think the people should have listened to the original voice over, but we tried to leave the key parts of it.

Editing

Title

First of all, I thought that our title was really good because it had a nice effect to it. We had transitions between images and b-rolls. We used many pictures for b-roll, so for example, Ms. Shanks was talking about old people, young people, people of color or gender, we showed a montage of pictures. Some pictures weren't full screen but we would crop the picture and show on the screen while we see the person speak. We had a couple of jump cuts in our footage, and we cleaned some of them up by putting b-roll.

Montage of clothes/shoes

Overall
The best thing I like about my piece was while I said the voice over opener, there is a montage of clothes students are not allowed to wear. If we had more time in the segment I would of added the original voice over closer. The most important lesson that I learned while doing this project is to make sure to check your audio levels on the camera before you interview someone.