The final version starts off with the presenter at Elsecar station. Not the grandest or punchiest of openings, more along the lines of stock and secure. It�s just the one shot, an average one of the presenter beside the sign. Perhaps we could have used more variety of shots of such as a close up of the sign for example. We possibly could have developed a punchy and imaginative opening sequence of some kind. But it is what it is, it could be better but it�s OK.
There is a slight discrepancy in the opening speech as the presenter says �we have seen her in casualty etc� when this is the opening of the product and we haven�t. The rest of the opening speech is OK as it outlines the piece and introduces the girl. The next transition of before the opening sequence is a little strange. It just cuts to black, which isn�t the greatest edit possible. A fade to black is the instant suggestion, it might not be the greatest or most imaginative idea, but would have looked better than a cut to nothing.
The title sequence is bold and works quite well. This turns out to be one of the highlights of the entire product. �An insight with Louise Atkins� being on a bold white on black complements the powerful music. If it was any other colour combination then it night not have the same effect. The shot of Louise from King girl is an excellent way to introduce her to the eye of the audience. The way it tilts to reveal her face, this has been chosen wisely.
The tune of �little green bag� starts up as we see Louise in a bandstand. Asking about her start in acting is a logical way to begin the programme. The way the question is asked in one camera position then we dissolve to another one, a two shot, for the answer. This has some merit as the questions are visually defined from the answers and it makes it more interesting. Perhaps we would have been better to use the two shot for the questions, as then we could see the person asking them. But this isn�t a great concern and it is better to have the closer shot of Louise at the start as this is the first time we have seen her outside one of her roles.
Then our first real slice of her acting, her career of making herself into other people and do this convincingly. �I�ll slash your balls off� is very convincing and after meeting her, is even more convincing.
What was king girl about? Doesn�t really tell us anything about her public or private life, but is nicely edited. This is the only section of the whole that has Louise talking over footage of her acting, a tool that could have been exploited more readily. It adds more visual interest than a scary looking girl talking in a bandstand. The visual of her getting pushed down the stairs compliments her talking about the subject of King girl, bullying in a school etc. It�s good the way we briefly cut back to her before continuing on the journey.
Now occurs one of the biggest mistakes in the whole film. After discovering we needed an extra four minutes, on the day before the hand in date, it seems we decided to make this up by showing a sign. I�m not sure what to say about it really � it�s ludicrous! It is very strange as well the way it pull out to a general shot of the exterior building then we cut back to it about four times. It�s way too long, the camera work is shaky and it�s just bizarre!
Next section is the interview with Gavin. The first critical element that we notice is the framing of the shot. It isn�t the most compact or ideally composed visually, with there being too much shelf space surrounding the tutor, giving us a glimpse of a bottle of Becks in the background. Also there are several zooms in and out, which seem very strange and may distract the audience. The next fault is you can�t hear the questions.
I was on sound and I have a defence case for this. We could record the questions anytime, we only had one chance to interview this person. I could have moved the boom towards JD to pick up the questions, but that would involve rapidly moving it back and possibly cutting off the start of the irreplaceable answers. In the eventuality we needed to re-record the questions to put them on afterwards to achieve this plain of continuity. We have a presenter who introduces the programme, chats to Louise and ultimately plays a glamorous game with her at the end, so why isn�t she asking the questions to Louse�s old tutor rather than this strange editing bloke?
In the present form it is really strange as you fail to pick up on the answer until a couple of lines into it. We could have coaxed the tutor into incorporating the answer into the question rather than starting with a confusing �Yes..� but re-recording the questions was the way to go.
It is during this interview that the background music naturally fades out and restarts a couple of seconds later. This is very funny and possibly not the greatest way to proceed. The constant background music does have some credit as it increases the interest of the piece but there is a battle in the mind as the lyrics compete for your attention. The tune sparks off connotations of film, due to its Tarrentino connection but mostly fails to fit in several sequences of our film. The way it�s on constant play throughout, a jagged loop, seems amateurish. We are amateurs but it is a vast room for improvement.
The music doesn�t fit at all with the next clip. �Your husband has lost a lot of blood and there are bone fragments pressing upon his brain� announces a doctor, with a happy tune going on in the background �looking for some happiness, instead I just find loneliness goodbye � eeee�.� � your husband is dying�. It�s like watching a horror film with music by the smurfs.
Return to Gavin�s interview. Again we hear no question so, initially the answer is a bit confusing. Then the strangest thing happens � Gavin talking but moving his lips at a different time. I�ll have to ask him how he does this the next time I see him. Perhaps he�s auditioning for a part in one of those dodgy ninja films on Channel 4 at four in the morning. Here this technique of speech is standard practice.
Despite this synch problem Gavin says some worthy stuff about acting as a career. There isn�t mush of a focus on the personal life of the selected individual throughout the piece, but it would be interesting to tie in the words with videotape of her student performances. This could focus on the visual side of performing, using the sound (and soundtrack!) over the footage similar to what is evident when we see Louise being pushed down the stairs.
During this interview, which has shaky camerawork from the stand in operator, the music starts for a third time before we move onto the next section of the piece � still images with voice over � the only time it is evident throughout the production.
�Here are some of the co-stars Louise worked with in King girl� � she worked with a bunch of people, a newspaper clipping and someone else. This isn�t edited together in the most effective way. If we had had the newspaper cutting at the start to illustrate the �king girl� element of the piece � it would be more logical. Perhaps the newspaper clipping was a fully qualified actor with a lead role in a film about bullying, but I doubt it. It would look bizarre no matter where it appeared in this section and could have been used elsewhere.
The purpose behind this little chunk as a whole is clouded and mysterious. This is a programme about Louise and not these other people, and it tells us nothing relevant about her. Perhaps it stems from the fact that we had pictures of her with her co-stars rather than having a clearly thought through purpose. The personal life of the star is a blank territory, not filled in by the product as all. The public face, her career, is fairly well mapped out, but the person behind the face remains a mystery.
This is an overriding criticism of the film as a whole and there is a shadow cast over whether it fits in, in relation to the brief. A more informative section explaining that she has to work for a phone company nowadays to make ends meet and she still goes to auditions, would have been more informative and relevant than fellow professionals she worked with four years ago.
The �smurf factor� is evident in the next clip we see too. A mother is being separated from her children in a hospital accident and emergency unit, yet we still have this upbeat tune playing in the background. It is also confusing in the structure of the piece as the previous section is about King girl and it takes a little while to us to acclimatise to the jump to this unrelated programme. There is nothing to point us towards the fact we are not watching casualty, so perhaps just a caption explaining this would anchor the audience to the footage.
�Poosticks� � the glamorous game played by all acting celebrities. Its inclusion is bizarre as far as relevance goes. Technically it has its faults - we don�t even see the sticks coming out of the bridge. It smacks of being put in with the chief purpose of making up time or padding out and is completely removed from the meaning and purpose of the programme as a whole.
It could make more sense if the river/ stick encounter was anchored differently �As you can see Louise has made a name for herself in the world of glamour and glitz�. The glamour of throwing a stick in a stream, the majestic dream of watching it float on the water � oh! the joys of acting! Perhaps a more relevant voice over would be something like �Louise has a lot of time on her hands and Elsecar is very, very dull�. Then comes possibly the greatest moment of the film �not bad for someone from Barnsley�.
The credits are accompanied by a soft music that eludes tones of the cinematic. It doesn�t seem out of place but goes on a little longer than necessary. The captions explain the music and detail Louise's acting performances � an interesting and informative element used, I suspect, to bring the programme home and up to ten minutes.
Generaly the white flashes work well as a transition, fitting the slick opening credits and music better than a more laboured approach. In the end perhaps this technique was born more out of necessity, as we didn�t have any cutaways to cut the programme together in a more orthodox way. The main faults are the looped music that doesn�t fit in with the dramatic content, the ridiculous encounter with the sign and the confusing poosticks thing at the end. The progression of the narrative generally doesn�t fit together in a logical way and it could have been a lot tighter. Omissions include the theatre work, this could have been used to bolster the interview and the stark fact that for �personalities� we only have a feint idea of what her personality is. Little about her private life is unravelled, hampering the effectiveness in terms of the objectives in our brief.
All in all the programme is strange and doesn�t meet it�s potential. We had an actress who we had clear assess to and we didn�t exploit her for our purposes. We were so disorganised that there is no excuse for the programme being handed in late. The main problem in this kind of project was always going to be assess to the personality, as the group interviewing a referee found out. We had no such hassles, we were just poor. We knew the person, the second interview was with a tutor who 3/5 of the group see every week for acting for camera and was easy to get hold of. We could have easily recorded it way before we did. This would have meant a more planned and relaxed editing process, and a more assured and rounded final product.