Question 7: Looking Back At Your Preliminary Task, What Do You Feel You Have Learnt In The Progression From It To The Full Product?

As a film maker from the preliminary task I have developed my skills in many ways. The problems that we encountered in the preliminary we have learned from and they were no longer a problem when recording and editing our thriller.

From the conclusion of our preliminary we said that in our thriller we wanted to use manual focus and manually hold the camera to give more of an action film in our film as in our preliminary all of the shots where taken by tripod causing lack of action; I feel that we completed these ambitions within our thriller as we used manual focus in various shots and there is much more action in our film with tracking and panning shots such as the credit panning shots and the factory tracking shot.

 From our preliminary we did carry the idea of recording many takes and a lot of different shots so that we had a large variety when editing, this proved itself useful for the second time round when creating our thriller to have flow, make sense, and look like a professional movie. When filming and editing we have developed our thriller hugely and continuity and composition has become almost a subconscious technique to us where we are automatically recording shots abiding by the 180 degree rule, rule of thirds, and bearing in mind the golden mean with the focus points of our shot.  To plan our shots and ideas when filming we created a brief storyboard and shot list of shots that we needed to capture however we also took extra shots that where last minute ideas to widen our variety of shots as much as possible to make editing easier and lessen the risk of having to re-film.

In conclusion I feel that our opening was a success and we encountered only minor problems and where able to make them less noticeable or fix them due to the skills we have learned from our preliminary task and whilst filming and editing our thriller. We encountered no problems the same as we did in our preliminary proving that we have learned from our mistakes and are developing film producers. In our thriller the main problem we encountered was the lighting within the bedroom scene when filming the protagonist, this was unusual and very unfortunate for us as the shots did not seem dark or grainy on the small camera screen and only moving them to a bigger screen showed the noticeable but minor defections within the quality.

Dark Shots From Bedroom Scene

Another problem we encountered when editing was how the diegetic sound of the water flowing in the quick shots when the girl appears in the mirror as it can be heard to change with the different shots; however this may have worked to our advantage in my opinion as it gives a disillusioned effect which works well within the thriller.

With the water sound and the lighting with some of our shots being the weaknesses of our thriller there are also many strengths within it that still have gave us a movie to be proud of. For example the mirror shots where the girlfriend appears works very well and builds tension just as the introduction finishes which would work well to go into a full movie. I feel that the shots we captured in the warehouse setting with the antagonist walking off up the low ceiling corridor showed dominance within the character but the clothing and hidden identity created a lot of mystery which the audience would anticipate to know the answer too drawing them into the film.

I feel overall our production was a success and we have developed our movie making skills in various ways from our preliminary and will continue to develop films that continue to get better as we learn from our mistakes and gain experience.