Q7 - Looking Back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Demands/requirements of the task

The 180 degree rule helped to
develop our understanding of creating
a coherent and fluid sequence.

In general, very little planning was needed for our preliminary task, and there was a significant step up in terms of effort in shaping the outline of our opening, however there was also more challenging aspects of the shoot itself. We were required to plan each day we would be able to shoot and take into account lighting, colour and sound, especially when dealing with outdoor areas. In contrast to our preliminary task, our mise en scene and plot had to be carefully chosen in order to reflect the themes and sub-genre of our thriller. Our preliminary task featured very simple camerawork, in order to establish the key skills needed to successfully capture a conversation using the 180 degree rule, and had very little focus on creative camerawork, mise en scene or sound editing. Therefore we faced much more complex techniques when shooting and editing our opening, which required more vision regarding the ways in which we could creatively present our character, themes and plot.

Pre-production

Between the production of our preliminary task and opening, we analysed multiple examples of the openings in real thrillers, developing our understanding of how to use various techniques, such as the connotations of a colour palette and choice of soundtrack in order to give our opening an overall more cohesive feeling. Furthermore we were influenced by various scenes that were analysed in class, for instance we adopted techniques used in the walking scene from 'Kill Bill' in our opening, in order to make the characters transition from outdoors to indoors more interesting. Another challenge we faced was trying to follow the conventions of a Thriller, and the fact that we had to work around 

this, whereas with our preliminary task there was very little restriction on the tone of the piece. We were also required to produce a shooting schedule and a plan for the location we would film on, as well as the creation of our character and his personality and also a storyboard to establish the outline of shots and narrative we would use.  

   

Production

The logistics of filming outside of school were inherently tougher than how we were restricted to the school sight in our preliminary task, however this gave us more freedom when it came to our ambition within the locations of our opening, and allowed us to choose a much more urban location, which contributed massively to the overall tone of the piece. We also had to take into account weather and lighting which restricted our filming times in some cases. Another thing we learnt from the preliminary task is that a large variety of shots keeps the sequence from becoming too repetitive or boring, and therefore we made sure to obtain a variety of shots when shooting, often filming the same action from 3 or 4 different angles. We also tried to make sure that all of our shots were centred well and had an interesting enough composition to keep the audiences attention. We knew that by getting a large variety of shots we would be making the editing process far easier, and also allowing for multiple possible edits to be made.

Post-production 

Throughout the editing process of our opening, we used far more complex editing techniques than in our preliminary task, as we wanted to present our story in a more visually interesting way rather than in simply a presentable state. Rather than having a focus solely on the continuity of the edit, we also had to overlay a soundtrack found on freesound.org and add things like the title card which were required to also fit the sub-genre of our opening. However the preliminary task did teach us the basic skills required to import and cut together footage and to a certain extent allowed us to look back at the mistakes we made during the editing of that piece and build on them in our thriller opening. The actual pace of the editing in our final piece was far faster than the preliminary task, conventionally in order to build the tension required in the opening of a thriller, this meant that although the opening looked more professionally made, there were far more cuts between footage and so more room for error in cutting too soon or late. however after our rough cut many of the edits that we felt looked unprofessional or unfinished were altered in order to smooth out the continuity of our opening.



Skillset


I feel that throughout our research and production of our opening, I have learnt how to produce and edit a basic piece of visual media, but more importantly how to tell a story through the medium of purely visuals and music, and therefore how to construct a sophisticated type of media and film in a more artistic and creative way. Furthermore I feel that our research on how to film someone walking/in a conversation taught me that there is an important difference between simply trying to get a specific shot in order to show an event and finding a creative way to portray a scene in order to not only give a more subtle tone to the piece, but also to keep the audience interested in the sequence. During editing the pace and rhythm of our opening was also modified hugely from the initial cut, as we realised that leaving any one shot on screen for too long resulted in a far less energetic and animated feeling scene, therefore we took a far more fast paced approach towards our editing and tried to speed up the pace of the opening as a whole.     

The clips we used to learn about filming walking/a conversation