Which technical skills did you learn while completing the preliminary task?
When producing our preliminary task we were confident in our work, however looking back now I feel we have come along way. Our shots are more sophisticated and the standard level of work has been risen hugely. One of the main faults of our preliminary tasks was the overall simplicity of it, we filmed in school and did not use the most advanced techniques. Therefore it was clear our film had been made by novice students. However since then we have learnt many things.The importance of good quality lighting had been a major learning curve for myself, knowing how the lighting of a scene could completely change a scene increased the standard of our work significantly. For example the lighting in this shot, take from our preliminary task is clearly not the best, however comparing it to the shit taken from the final cut of thriller opening this is clearly a significant improvement.
In our prelimnary task our continuity editing was quite successful, this may have been due to all of our takes being shot on the same day. We have replicated one of successful shots in final thriller opening, shot reverse shot, these hots are extremely successful as they create fear with our protagonist.
The shots of our preliminary task are not as intense as our thriller opening, although they may be successful in showing our characters journey through the scenes they do not illustrate our characters properties like a mysterious or vindictive personality. However, on the other hand our thriller opening is much more successful in conveying our protagonist and antagonist attributes. I believe it conveys our protagonist fear very successfully, this is done by the variety of different shots and the quick paced editing.
What have you learnt?
In both our preliminary task and thriller opening we were given a specific brief to work towards, this was extremely helpful as it ave us specific guidelines to to work within, for example we knew we had to create an opening for a thriller film; thus giving us a guideline for a plot and character types.
Working to a deadline has been difficult in some aspects like wanting to spend extra time on blogposts than was given. However, I think myself and our group have successfully worked well with the given deadlines. I think this was due to good communication from our group and becoming good friends.
Research and planning had become essential to having a successful media product, we planned every detail. We planned every shot so when it came to filming we had every shot played out how we wanted it done, this saved us a lot of time. Research helped us understand the genre of a thriller film so that we could develop our film into a good quality thriller opening. Over all I feel we have all been equally successful in our planning and research.
