In preparing my films for the final submission I have tweaked the edit I did of Night Journey to take into account the feedback from Chris from the screenings.
There were three main issues that were noted, which I have corrected prior to submission:
1) When the traveller descends the escalator in the station there is a man already in shot at the bottom of the escalator. He is wearing bright red overalls and pushing a trolley. This man was distracting from the action that the viewer should be watching, which is the traveller heading for the platform to catch his train.
To alleviate this I cropped the start of the clip so that the man in the red overalls is already out of shot by the time the clip starts and the main focus of the action is the traveller. Cropping the first couple of seconds of the clip didn't affect the flow of the film, and actually made it more fluent and resulted in a good pace. (After all, viewers don't want to watch too much footage of a man going down an escalator. It's not the most thrilling action! I did want the clip in though to show the train station and the platforms as an establishing shot to show that he's at a station and a traveller.)
2) The sound during the cut away to the train carriage when the guard enters the compartment was too loud and didn't sit comfortably with the flow of the scene. I was torn between taking out the cut away all together, or amending the sound. I decided to play around with the sound levels first and try atmos audio from another section of the film. I found that I could adjust the sound levels in the clip to make it non intrusive and this improved the clip enormously.
3) The double-ending. I must admit that when I first edited the film together I was really quite proud of the double-ending, thinking that it gave a mysterious, contemplative ending to an already eerie and thoughtful film. However, when I watched it in the screening with Chris and the rest of the group I realised as soon as the empty carriage scene played, it should have ended there. That was a good strong, mysterious ending.
As Chris said, with a short film you want the audience to have a strong, decisive ending and give them something to respond to, and applaud. A double-ending drags the viewer out of what they thought was the finish and at which point they had stopped concentrating and were already responding to the end scene that has just been presented to them and starting to reflect on the film.
Of course, the best way to overcome this issue was to crop the double-ending off and leave it with the better end scene, which I did.
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