Evaluation Question 7

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

I think that, comparing our preliminary task to our finished thriller opening product, my media skills have greatly improved.

In our preliminary task, we had a basic idea of what we wanted to film and where we were filming, and how we wanted to finished preliminary task to look. We came across many problems in filming though, for example we planned on having a scene where a metal shutter opened for one of the characters to come into the scene, when we went to film we found that we couldn’t use the shutter, so we had to improvise, and this wasn’t as easy as we hoped it to be. When we came to editing, we found the three cameras we had used had filmed in a different file format to that which the Macs would accept, so we had to use a converter to change the format of the footage, and in doing this, some of the footage was lost. We then found that the continuity of the footage wasn’t as good as we needed it to be to make it realistic.

 

For our main task we used this experience to make our thriller opening to the best of our abilities.

We planned our thriller on location, this let us practise test shots so that we would know what we got when filming, this way we wouldn’t come to filming at the set and find things weren’t how we needed them to be, this way we wouldn’t have to improvise as much as we had to on our preliminary task.

During filming, we made sure to film everything numerous times, so we would have a good selection of footage to choose from during editing. We also got a variety of shots of the same scene, this way we could mix different angles together for the same scene to make it more interesting and to also get a variety of shot types in the finished product. We also filmed a few shots that we never planned and found that these were better than the shots that we did plan.

We never planned this shot. Turned out to be one of our favourite.

When editing, we made a few different versions of our thriller so that we could experiment and find the best techniques. This was useful because if we liked something we could change it on our main version, but if we didn’t, we hadn’t made the change to our main edit so we wouldn’t have problems with undoing it.

We did come across a few problems while we were filming;

• Authenticity: Because our thriller was set in the 50s, we had to make sure there weren’t any modern objects lying around, like digital clocks, phones and so on. In the kitchen scenes, we had to cover up the digital display on the oven with a tea towel so that the audience wouldn’t be able to see it when it was watched.
• Acting: We found that some of our planned shots couldn’t be carried out because of, to be honest, difficulties acting. It wasn’t a problem, none of use are professionals, but we had to find a way to compensate for shots we couldn’t fit in because of this.



Donley can't act, so we compromised and had a shot from this angle instead.

• The camera: We filmed for about 7 hours, and didn’t want to turn the camera off too much so we would have plenty of footage to show how we had filmed, this did mean we had to take breaks every few hours to charge the camera back up.
• Missed shots: We didn't film a few of our planned shots, such as the thief stealing something from the house after murdering the detectives wife. Although we missed these off, we never felt that it hindered the realism of the story.

We didn't have any real problems when filming, and our thorough planning meant we were able to work efficiently and get all of the footage we needed. On the day, we only missed one of the shots we planned on having, and this didn't have any consequence on our finished product. As a group, we worked really well together, I don't feel as if any of us didn't work as much as we should have, and we all got the work we had to do done.