Task 7

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

I think that I have learnt a great deal in the progression from our preliminary task to our Thrillers. I think my technical skills and creative skills have both greatly improved.

Planning
When we did our preliminary task, we got given a script, told which angels to shoot and then got aloud out to shoot it in the space of one period. On the day our group grabbed two people that were not doing anything and got them to be our actors. Once in the room we shot from a few different angles and then finished up. There was not a great deal of preparation or organisation.
With our Thrillers we had much more time to plan and organise. We had to look far greater into the detail of our video, the mise en scene, the set and the actors. Everything needed to be planned and had to be organised in time for the day of shoot. Luckily we had much more time for preparation and for the shoot, we had a whole day to shoot which gave us enough time to get all the different sets and shots we needed.

Development
With our prelims our dialogue did the story telling for us and also we only had basic shots of wide, medium and close. This meant that there was not a great deal of things to worry about or think about. However when it came to our thriller we had to figure out how to convey what our movie was about within the space of about two minutes. It took a lot of planning, we had to make many different storyboards to best figure out how to tell the story and figure out the best angles to shoot from. The whole process is far more complicated as you have to plan out a sophisticated sequence with a visual narrative. I found that trying to tell a story visually as apposed to with dialogue is harder but I felt that it was a lot more fun. I personally felt it gave us a chance to creatively work on an interesting way to portray a story in the best visual way.

Camera Work
I think that work produced in the thriller has greatly developed from when we did our preliminary tasks; I think the camera work is more sophisticated and our way of thinking in terms of angles and framing has improved greatly. Our group used tracking shots that we didn’t even look at in the prelim task. I think that this made our shots look far smoother and more professional, as a group I think it gave us the opportunity to explore a greater range of camera skills and how shots work. In terms of our thriller I think the use of the tracking shots made the whole sequence work better and allowed to piece it together a lot easier in the editing process.

Sound
In the prelim task our sound was simply what was recorded through the boom mic on the day. Our thriller however used many different sound clips laid over the top so that it would sound better but also to portray the story of our movie more interestingly. If we recorded the ambient sound off the television in the studio then it would not have sounded good when it came to editing. So it was better for us to find the track and lay it over the video. This meant lip-syncing it up with the video shown on the screen, once again this is far more sophisticated than the preliminary task. Also by laying tracks over the top of the video it gave us the chance to put in other tracks and sounds such as a radio report of Marilyn’s death.

Technology
The use of technology in our thriller was far different to the prelim task as we used ‘Final Cut Pro’ far better than we had before, this is because we explored the programme a lot more and experimented. This meant we got the chance to add titles to our thrillers that we didn’t use in our prelims. We never got to explore this before so it was very interesting to figure out how to best put in the titles. This was a big step up from our prelims, as we didn’t need to think about where to place names. The whole development from the prelim task to the thriller was really big in terms of editing as for the prelim all we had to do was concentrate on matching up the different shots and make sure the dialogue sounded fine. For the thriller we needed to match up the shots, add sound and check it sounded appropriate for the video, add titles in the correct places, change the sound to make it sound like it was coming from a television and edit the colour to make it appear as if it was a fifties video. The whole process was a lot more complex but looking back on it I am glad it was more complex as it made it challenging and from that I learnt so much about the editing process and technology involved.