question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the fill product?

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the fill product?

If you compare my preliminary task to the final product you can see clearly that the final production has come a long way compared to the preliminary. Our preliminary included all of the shots that we were asked to include and they were all shot well and you could see clearly what shot each was and why it had been used in a specific place. in the prelim we used a much wider variety of shot compared to our final production, although the final product uses appropriate shots that are more effective.

One thing that was very rushed in the preliminary task was the planning, we did a rough shot list and story board and began filming, we learnt from this that if we wanted to create an effective thriller and have an easy filming day we would need to plan things in much more detail. The planning we did for our final product was in much more depth and detail than the preliminary task, the first thing that we created was a schedule so that everyone in the group clearly knew what we needed to be done and when by; this made sure that the group would be on time and everyone would know what they are doing.  We also created a lot more thing when planning instead of just creating a story board and shot list we created

·         A story board

·         Mise-en-scene lists

·         Shot lists

·         Risk assessment

·         Consent forums

·         Actor auditions

·         Location scouting

·         Sound ideas

·         Opening sequence time line

·         Company ident

·         Pitch  

All of this meant that we were much more prepared when we were filming and had a clear idea of what we had to do and what needed to be filmed. The shot list and story board that we created in our preliminary was also a lot less detailed than the ones that we created for our final production, it was a lot easier to film with detailed shot lists and story boards as we knew exactly what we wanted and also made sure we had included all of the shots we wanted. We could also make sure that the continuity was good through the story board so that it wasn’t something that needed to be took into a huge amount of consideration when filming.

 

 In the preliminary task there were a lot of continuity issues that were hard to cut out or try and hide, when filming over the shoulder shots there was a continuity issue, in one shot the glasses are on the subjects face and the next on her head, this creates confusion for the audience as they didn’t see the glasses being moved. The quality of the preliminary task was also poor compared to our final production, our preliminary was shot on the iphone 6 which although has a good camera did not create good quality footage due to things such as the lighting and filming inside. When filming our final product, we wanted to make sure that the quality was better so shot the footage on a canon camera that shot much better quality footage.  We also made sure that we shot in appropriate lighting, most of the final product was shot in natural lighting so the footage was of a much better quality. 

Over all I am very pleased with how the final opening that we created turned out, one thing I felt was a success was the continuity of the opening, one way we were able to keep good continuity was by making sure we kept the 180˚ rule, this meant that it would cause less confusion between the audience. We also made sure that we kept continuity through costume, as we filmed some parts on different days and the opening was supposed to look like it is one day we needed to make sure that costume and make up were all the same; as we did this it also helped to create good continuity.  Lighting was another factor that we had to consider when thinking about continuity, if the lighting was to change half way through it would ruin the continuity. To overcome this, we tried to make sure that any filming in natural lighting was shot in one day and we wouldn’t need to go and re film anything that may change the lighting.  

I think something else that was effective and successful was how we created tension and suspense a lot of the feedback we got from our audience said they found it really effective and were quite scared by it. We created tension through the use of quick cuts and short shots they increase the tension by making it fast pace and the audience can only see what is happening for a short amount of time making them question what is going on and creating enigmas. We used a duel narrative which also really helped to create tension as you see each narrative and they then come together at the end; at the beginning the audience is left questioning if the narratives are related or not. We also tried to make sure that the editing fitted with sound if there was an action on screen we tried to make sure that the sound was edited to it. Overall I feel that the editing was a big success; the editing was very clean and everything was edited together very nicely. The editing also helped to create tension as we used fast pace editing. The time in which we edited it was also good as it was done very quickly and we could see any errors and get them changed quickly and respond to any feedback that people gave us to help make it the best we could.  

One thing that has really improved from the preliminary is our sound track, in our preliminary we just found an unsigned track and added it to the footage. For our final production we created our own soundtrack, we used a number of different sound clips to create a sound montage, we used clips of missing person phone calls. The sound is non-diagetic and asynchronous sound is does not match the actions in the screen, although it is relevant to the piece. The sound if effective as it really helps to create tension as high points in the sound match on screen. The sound also adds a scare factor as a child going missing is a parents’ worse fear and it almost confirms for people watching that the protagonist is going to be kidnaped and taken.

Something that if I was to do again would be camera quality although we had improved the quality from our preliminary task I still felt that at some points the quality was not as good as we wanted. Some of this was due to team members’ reliability and not being able to make it to filming days, as some members owned the cameras that we wanted to use we relied on them to be able to provide the equipment we wanted. One filming day people were unable to come and this meant that we had to compromise and downgrade cameras. If I were to re shoot something I would change is probably considering members of the group.

After getting audience feedback I would possibly change the male actor some people felt that he looked more like an older brother rather than a stalker and did confuse some people, next time we should possibly use an older person or change is costume as people also said that they felt the backpack took away from his character and made him look younger.

Something that we may consider changing if we were to do it again would be the positioning of the titles; as we superimposed our titles onto the video footage it meant that we had to have the video as the background and this made it difficult to see the titles. Although the typography of the titles was a success and felt that it fitted well with the thriller genre.