Changes between Rough Cut and Final Cut

There are significant differences between our rough cut and the final edit of our video. I feel these have hugely improved the quality of the video, the storyline and impact that the video has upon the viewer.
The issues that were raised when we previewed the rough cut to the class was the blandness of the performance footage and the fact that the narrative wasn't particularly clear. We brain stormed as a group to come up with solutions to these problems. It was evident that we were going to have to collect a lot more footage. To start with we got extra footage of Christie and Sarah on the beach and in the caves. We took some footage of them walking along the pier to show the characters being lost and we also took some footage of key lyrics from the song written in the sand, helping to link the song lyrics with the visuals. I wrote these key lyrics in a script-like font to help connect this to the DVD cover and advert.
In order to make our narrative make sense to the viewer we decided the best idea would be to get footage of younger girls, showing our characters when they were children and emphasising how their friendship and been lost and rediscovered. We took the younger girls down to the beach and got footage of them playing together. We wanted to convay to the viewer that this footage was in the past, as the narrative was already in black and white we needed to think of another way of giving an old fashioned, nostalgic effect. We decided to use the same technique as we were using for the rose footage, stop motion. We took still images of the children and put them together on premier elements to create a moving image. We wanted the "note motif" to be slightly clearer without being too obvious and whilst maintaining a certain ambiguity. To achieve this we took photographs of the children holding and passing the note, these were then fitted into the video next to the footage of Christie and Sarah passing the note to help emphasis the relevance of the note.
As well as this we were also very unhappy with the band performance footage that we had, we came to the conclusion that we were going to have to re-shoot it. The main problem with the band footage was the setting and the lighting, to change this completely and to link the performance with the narrative we decided to shoot the performance at the beach outside of St Marys lighthouse, as well as looking effective the lighthouse also adheres to Goodwins theory and the notion of looking. This is particuarly relevant to our video as it represents being lost and being found, as if a fog has lifted.
We went down to the beach at 7.30 am and set up the band and camera equiptment. We took footage from various different camera angles using a variety of different movements. The lighting was perfect as the sun was beginning to rise in the east. This footage was so much better than our original footage, we were all very pleased with it and confident that we'd beable to edit in a way that would greatly improve the video. I feel in the end we have done this.