Q7

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

When looking back on our media preliminary task, I can see we managed to get a stronger feel for the equipment we were using, which I believe has helped our thriller opening to be more professional with the type of shots we have done and our use of editing, such as the overlays, which we were a lot more afraid to use in our preliminary task. However, we stuck to important conventions such as the 180° rule, shot reverse-shot and match on action, these helped our production keep up with a professional and organised style we wanted it to be.

I also feel we were a bit too eager to create our preliminary and rushed our planning for it, only going off a quick storyboard, however with this task, we planned the location a long time in advance and visited it to get location photos and pick the rooms we were use and the route we were going to take with the camera to get to it, these were planned with the ideas of getting the most thrilling scenery whilst having the safest route, this, and the use of storyboards and shot lists helped us plan the shots we were going to use and also helped us to keep continuity.

For our preliminary, we used very simple shots using the tripod, mainly consisting of still shots; however we found that when we created a shot of walking with the tripod it created a nice tracking shot, however, it wasn’t as smooth as we wanted it.

For our thriller opening we were able to get hold of a Glidecam, this allowed us to be a lot more free to move the camera around using a tracking shot and increase or decrease the pace of the movement and angle of the shot without having any bounce of footsteps, this has lead our production to have a very professional, smooth feel to our shots we have used.

Although we used Final Cut Pro in our preliminary, I feel we have shown development in creativity in our thriller opening, an example of this is our use of overlaying shots, which we used in the corridor scenes, we did not use this technique in our preliminary, however found it gave our thriller a personalized style and allowed us to fit more footage into the opening.

We have been a lot more confident with sound compared to our prelim, for our prelim we only used one soundtrack and created simple loops, however, in out thriller, we used multiple soundtracks and also added sound effects, this gave us much more of a bold sound, which we thought worked well with our thriller.

We did take one huge aspect from our preliminary to our thriller, that is the camera choice, we filmed on a Canon 550D, this camera was great for us, it is lightweight and small, allowing us to carry it around very easily around, we were able to film in full HD, which we knew would give us a really professional looking production at the end and also we found the ability to use manual focus a bonus, giving us more freedom to have shots exactly how we wanted them.

I think one of the main strengths we have to our thriller is the way we have weaved our clips to relate to the music, such as the scene in our thriller when Jake is walking to the door, the music is loud and tense leading up to him grabbing the door, however, the music then suddenly cuts down for our shot of him opening the door, this false tension we have used really holds the tension throughout our production, instead of it simply being in one place and having a large amount of tension very quickly.

I think a weakness is our lighting, because of the problems we had with power links, we were not able to use the lighting we wanted to, this made some of our shots quiet dark and I feel it hid some of the important aspects of our thriller we wanted people to pick up on, however, this was easily mended through the use of colour correction in Final Cut Pro X.

Overall I strongly believe we have created a very effective and professional thriller opening, we have shown a confident use of shots and a creative flare with our editing, also where we have come into trouble, we have put in hard work to figure out how we can alter this to make it as good as possible, this attention to detail has, I feel, helped our production pushed through the boundaries set for us.