William Traynor

The Heist

Evaluation

During the production of a TV cop drama trailer there will be strengths and weaknesses along the road. In this evaluation I will be talking about what our group did and if we had any problems how we’d overcome them. I will be also be talking about how and where we filmed our trailer.

To start us off we had to do some research on some other crime drama series already made and were shown on TV such as Sherlock and CSI. This helped us because we weren’t sure how we would start our trailer of, either if we wanted a long shot of the criminals that were blurred figures or if we wanted a close up shot. To help us keep our idea alive we started to plan what was going to happen and what we wanted in our trailer.

We decided to base our cop crime drama on a bank heist and that two robbers wanted to rob a bank for obvious reasons. Each of us decided to work on our own storyboard to show our independence and creativity. We wanted to do our own storyboard because all of us had our own ideas.

William Traynor

This was my storyboard and I wanted a classic cop chase between two robbers who robbed a bank and one police officer who is obviously trying to chase them down. Before we could start filming we needed to know some awesome locations for our trailer, so we took some pictures of the locations here’s a few of them.

In props and equipment wise we just bought a money bag which had to be quite big for what we were doing and all that the two robbers were wearing was just the normal school uniform but the two robbers were wearing two masks to hide their identity which you will see in my finished trailer.

William Traynor

In the filming process we all took it in turns on filming different shots in the trailer. We had quite a few different shots, to start off we started film the area that the trailer would take place whilst rotating the camera, the first shot is two people sitting round a table with a piece of paper and discussing something this establishes some kind of plot which you would expect from a TV crime drama. Another shot is when the two robbers’ plant something in the locker (vault) but this is from an angle which is looking up at them which shows they are in control of the situation.

When it came to editing we did our own independent trailer and for editing we used a site called adobe premiere, even though we had a lot of footage I didn’t use all of it because I was worried that it would be too long for a trailer so I cut it down to the best bits that I thought it would grab the audience’s attention. In some of the scenes they originally had false starts or the character in the scene stopped acting when the camera was still rolling. I countered these problems by simply cutting out these problems from the footage. I decided to add some music to the footage when I fitted it all together but actually for the trailer I only used one song for the entire trailer the song was called ‘let there be light’ by instrumental core just for those who were wondering, although I think I could off added a bit more variety when it came to music, but on the plus side I used fade outs between each scene, and on the last scene when it faded out I added a bomb explosion sound effect to go off simultaneously with the fade out.

I think at this point in the evaluation I should tell you who was in our group, there were 5 of us 4 boys and 1 girl but we did have the same idea for our crime drama. For our kind of crime drama I think the audience we were aiming at was adults or teenagers. In my trailer I used a variety of camera angles and shots which were in my finished

William Traynor

product such as the angle when the camera is facing up towards a character which shows that they are powerful in my case the Robbers. When it came to teamwork we didn’t assign each other roles to do we did our group work by everyone doing the same thing and then come together and choose which one is better. The images in my trailer I thought fitted alright but not perfect and at the end of the trailer I added the name of our crime drama title which isn’t that fancy but you can read it and it shows up easily which I think are the most important features to a film title. Overall I think my trailer came out really good and we as a group worked together really good when it came to planning and filming.

During the whole assignment I think the strengths of the planning were that everyone had the same idea but within that idea there were individual ideas to where it should be filmed. The weaknesses of the planning were the characters because some of us wanted three robbers instead of two and maybe only have one civilian instead of two. In the filming section however the strengths were that everyone got the chance to film different parts of the film and they worked out well. The weaknesses of the filming were the roles off the film as in who wanted to be which character, there were some debates on who wanted to be the main characters because none of us wanted to be the civilian but someone had to play as them but to be honest that debate didn’t last long because we didn’t have much time to film.

William Traynor

Overall I was a bit disorganised because things like the synopsis which is a short paragraph about you crime drama and each scene in the trailer I didn’t write up and add to my blog until near the end of the topic so that was the weakness of my overall performance but on the plus side of things I learnt how to edit my trailer on the program called adobe premiere and I got the hang of it quite quickly and it payed off with a trailer that I thought wasn’t that bad for my first go.

Overall my trailer had a lot of ups and downs such as when the first time I got all my footage onto adobe premiere and the next time I opened it I couldn’t edit it because I didn’t save it into a file that the computer could recognise but as soon I got it all on there the fun bit began which was editing, some of the beginnings of each scene had a little false start so I edited that part out using the razor tool but as soon as my trailer was finished some of my peers said it was ‘really good the story was clear and the camera work was good as well’ others said ‘good but could do better maybe add some more music to it give it more variety’. Overall the trailer came out really good.

In summary things to do next time:

Music variety Better sound FX Add some special FX