Preview Time

Last week we previewed all the films made by our Film group, with slightly surprising results.

This blog is running about a week behind, but if I hadn't mentioned it few of you would have realized. It's easy for filmmakers to forget that the audience aren't party to what they know. It can be used to one's advantage, but for most filmmakers at our level, it's as much a liability as an advantage.

This manifested itself last week when we attended a preview of all of the the films made by our Film group. The purpose of this was not to allow us to bask in glory (or more likely to cram our fists in our teeth with embarrassment) but to allow each group to watch the other's films. The results were surprising.

One of the other groups pointed out that they were unsure whether we were using the same location for two different scenes. We were, but realized that we needed to insert some sort of break scene to differentiate them (we had deleted an intervening scene).

A more serious concern was that the audience's understanding of one key scene was the opposite of what we were striving for. Some serious tweaking was needed, and that's now been done. But it really rammed home how easy it is to assume that audience are following the story ("but that's obvious!" is the usual reaction from those involved in the making of the film) and how dangerous that can be. It's easy to assume from familiarity that the story is transparent - so it's necessary to have strangers who don't have any preconceptions to watch a preliminary screening.

And that applies to blogs as well...