Rough Cut - Miss Miller

A rough cut is important to consider as it gives you a chance to share your work with others to gain constructive criticism from them to help make it better. Even if the clip is not finished, it should resemble the final finished product so the audience can give their opinions. If I was to; in terms of making a thriller opening, to submit my work without doing a rough cut, then the clip may not show its full potential, meaning it would not get as many marks as it could have.


Audience feedback is very important to consider as it give you a chance to get a 'fresh' opinion on our opening sequence. They can give you constructive criticism to help you improve elements that may not be working, but also tell you what elements are working and are effective, so that you can enhance them, or simply make sure you keep them.

When receiving feedback, my group and I created a presentation, which we showed to our class to allow them to get a better understanding of our clip, so they would be able to give us some feedback. The presentation included;

• What my groups individual ideas were.
• What our final narrative was.
• What we wanted to create. + How we think we have created it.
• How is it conventional.

We then showed our class our rough cut of our thriller sequence, which we had previously exported to you tube, allowing the option of feedback to be given through comments on the video.


When receiving feedback, we were told that we had many strengths and weaknesses. Our strengths included;

• Good use of low key lighting - conventional
• Good variety of shots used - high angles, low angles, eye levelled shot, handheld, etc
• Good variety of shot distances - Close up, Extreme close up, long shot, aerial shot, etc
• Good use of sound - builds tension/suspense.

Our weaknesses included;

• The plot was not clear.
• Not enough credits.
• Transitions between frames was 'messy'.

When thinking about how we could improve each of these weaknesses, we decided that we would make some changes. To make the plot clearer, we are going to add in some footage which shows the older sister in our narrative placing the gloves used to kill the little girl into a bag and throwing this into the forest. This would hint to viewers that perhaps the older sister was involved in the killing, and so would leave them wondering what her motives were. Although this was a weakness, it was also good because we wanted to leave the audience feeling confused, which we did, but having gained the feedback, now know that we should be leaving the audience questioning what happened, instead of them not knowing what they have just watched.

The weakness of there not being enough credits is a fair comment, simply because we had not finished all of the credits yet. It was good to show the few credits we had made as there were no comments as to the fading and blurring on/off of these credits, and so I have assumed these were effective, although it is hard to tell without them all being completed.

The transitions between the frames needs polishing, as it was commented that they looked messy. This probably occurred whilst cutting down the clip to under 2 minutes, as the sounds that originally matched the images, no longer do. To improve this, it will mean slowly going through the entire clip, and making sure that all the edits and sounds etc match the images.


This feedback will help me with finalising my final thriller opening sequence as it has given me and my group ideas as to how to improve our clip. We now have an understanding of how the audience will react and can hopefully adjust and change certain elements to help make our thriller opening sequence the most effective it can be.