Appreciating silent cinema

I never feel that I appreciate the importance of sound in film, it becomes apparent to me in the final stages of my editing that sound really is 50% of film. However, as the amount of sound decreases the importance of everything else increases, making films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis all the more incredible to watch knowing the dificulty of directing a silent film that is 3 minutes long let alone a feature.

I sorely underestimated the importance of sound in a project and in the future pledge to pay far more attention to everything surrounding mise-en-scene as well as sound, diegetic or not.

I also will actively seek out silent films new and old of all genres, in order to gain a more holistic approach to film and (attempt to) watch them with an analytical eye.

Rough Edit and Feedback

After assembling our rushes and forming a very rough edit based upon the storyboards I remained confident that the ideas we had in mind were clearly stated within the film, however; as Debbie stated in our initial edit feedback, it doesn't.

See for yourself (EDIT, there was a video clip of our rough edit here, but blogger didn't like it.)

It doesn't gel well together at all and frankly tires me out just watching it.

We also found that some of the shots needed to exude the bleak feeling less subtlely, perhaps changes to colour in our fine edit will remedy this.