Reservoir Dogs- Evaluation

I have finally finished editing my video and its finished. I took me about three lessons but its done now.

Thing that I found difficult were putting the text on for the names of the actresses and writing Reservoir Dogs at the end and the credits, because I didn’t even know how to even do it. With the help of Rosy I was shown how to do it. Once I learned how to do it I saved a customized font which was similar to the original one in the film and it saved me time when doing all the rest of the text.

What went well?

Things that went well in our video was the walking past the wall part, where everyone’s in sunglasses and the music is playing. It really recreates the ‘cool’ scene like in the film, and our version is like the female version and still looks just as good. Once that scene got put in slow motion when I did my editing it made it so much more similar to the film.

Another thing that went okay was the voice over I did, it could have been improved if I’m honest but only because I hadn’t listened to the original voice over before I did it myself so it wasn’t as similar. I think I spoke a little too fast but I did put on the american accent and try to speak deeply.

I think most of our costumes looked like the characters we were supposed to be, if you watched it you would be able to tell who was playing who. We decided to pay lots of attention to detail with things like the props on the table in the canteen, including the old fashioned mobile phone which Kate brought it, Ketchup and fake monopoly money. This made out video more convincing because we tried hard to recreate the scene as best we could with the resources we had. We also drew the wrinkles and bags on our faces if our characters had them, my character for example had LOADS of bags and was an old man so Robyn did my makeup for me and did a good job of making me look tired and old.

What could have been improved?

Things that could have been improved was when we filmed the part where the characters are shown with their names in yellow font, we should have zoomed in more on the characters faces, this would have made it more like the film because in the film the characters head is at the very top of the shot and their neck is at the bottom and the top of their shoulders showing.

I could have also padded out my outfit more as my character Joe was fat, and I only stuffed the front of my top, therefore making me look pregnant instead of fat.  If we were to do it again I would pad out all my clothes to make me look more like my character Joe.

When editing the shots together I found it difficult to put text on the ending shot where the group of characters are walking down the street and the credits roll up the screen saying ‘Reservoir Dogs’. This text stops at the top of the page. I found it extremely difficult to do and didn’t grasp how to do it as Mr Grant was always busy with someone else so he never got round to showing me how to do it. I asked some of my peers but I still didn’t understand, this was a problem because it meant that my ‘Reservoir Dogs’ text just rolls off the top of the shot and doesn’t stop.

What I enjoyed from this task

From making this video I have thoroughly enjoyed dressing up and making ourselves into the characters we are supposed to portray. That  was probably my favorite part as it makes the video look so much more colourful and interesting if we are dressed as our characters instead of wearing uniform.

I also loved trying to make our version of the film as close to the original as possible. It needed alot of focus from all of us to get the attention to detail but overall I think we achieved a pretty good outcome.

Here is our finished video:

The Making of Our Version of Reservoir Dogs-Planning

Our task was to recreate the opening scene to the film Reservoir Dogs, we were put into 2 groups, one of just boys and one of us girls. Then between us we all made the decisions on what characters we were and how was were going to achieve this task.

Here is the clip from the film Reservoir Dogs which we were copying:

To achieve this piece of filming to a high standard we had to assign roles to each other in the group. There was a director which was Jess Marshall, Jemma was organizer and made sure that everyone had a role and we all knew what we were doing. Grace looked at the clothing and wrote down what each character from the scene wore so that we could copy it. Lucy was the cameraman and filmed the whole thing. Lauren looked at location and where we could film each scene where it would look closest to the film as possible. Me and Rosy did the story boards, most of which was Rosy’s handy work as she took the story boards home and worked on them. Robyn and Kate helped with costumes and props, as when we watched the clip we wrote down as many props as we could notice which we would include in our version.

We had 3 lessons to plan our filming, which meant we had to focus and keep motivated to the task. In each hour of lesson we talked about what we needed to do when filming, practiced our walks and watched the clip endlessly to get down every piece of detail we could. We examined the positions and order of the characters, their clothes, hair, wrinkles, what was on the table in the diner etc.

Each character in the film had a specific ‘look’, my character for example was Joe who is a big old guy, He wore a brown top and grey trousers and he had quite big bags under his eyes. From this we all decided as a group that we would go for pencil skirts instead of trousers because we are an all girl group so we thought we should enhance it. I borrowed Graces grey pencil skirt and my mums turtle neck brown top. For the wrinkles, Robyn used an eyebrow pencil and drew bags under my eyes, lines near my mouth and between my eyebrows and lines at the corners of my eyes. I also stuffed a couple of hoodies up my top as my character is fat.

We are marked on our skills on how close to the film we can get it so we need to pay particular attention to what each character does and how they do it. We wanted it to be obvious which characters we were.