Peer Review

     Now that we had a finished product, it was time to get some constructive criticism! For this, we went to Marissa and Mackena’s dad, since he was in the house for the majority of our filming process and was familiar with our project and its purpose. We handed him my phone and waited in anticipation of what he would have to say about all of our hard work. 

    In the end, he only had a few minor comments that were easily fixable. We asked him about his comments on the content of our scenes and his first comment was that the toddler scenes at the park were very busy. What he meant by this was that there were a lot of people in the background and it was distracting from the eerie feeling we were aiming for. He suggested that we replace this scene with a different location.  

   It was a bit disappointing to hear this, knowing that we would have to delete two scenes of our creative work, but in a way, this was anticipated as we all noticed how busy the park was. However, the show must go on!

    His next criticism was that he did not realize that Marissa and Mackena were supposed to be sisters in the plot and that the script did not make that relationship clear enough. He suggested that we tweak the script a bit so that it is explicitly stated somewhere that Mackena is Marissa’s sister, and Riley’s friend. This was easily fixable as we could reshoot the beginning couch scene and add that bit of information into their conversation. 

    After he concluded that those were his only comments, we then asked him for feedback on the editing style. For this, he said he really enjoyed the sound effects and the songs that we used. He then brought up some conversational scenes were a bit echoey, to which we replied there was really nothing we could do since we did not have the time anymore to purchase clip-on microphones or any other type of audio equipment.  

He then brought up that he was unaware that the flashback scenes were flashbacks, and that they looked too similar to the present time parts of the film. For this, he suggested that we add a filter or change some part of the saturation or color on the scenes so that it was more obvious it was happening at a different time. 

In the end, other than these tweaks he said he really enjoyed our work. I’m so glad that all of our hard work and effort has paid off and we have a great work to show for it. All that’s left is to refilm our two scenes and fix the filters!