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

Considering the fact that I hadn’t ever done any professional filming with a digital video camera or using any video editing sites my skills were very basic. As a film maker my skills have come along way and I have also learnt many new skills. After doing the preliminary task I got a basic understanding of how to shoot different shots, how to use the editing software and how to make a successful product.

When doing the prelim task we made sure that we were fully well aware of the 180° rule. This meant that when we were doing our Thriller opening that we had taken a lot of care and put a lot of attention into it to make sure that we didn’t break this rule as it can change the whole feel of the film by breaking this rule. Keeping continuity as well in the prelim, when it came to the editing process, made the whole clip flow really smoothly. We realised that if the continuity isn’t that good then the whole product could be ruined. After putting this into practice with the prelim we made sure that we trimmed each clip so that each transition worked well.

In the preliminary task we wanted to just get used to using the camera, getting different shots and just to have a bit of fun with what we were doing.  We had a match on action section when the girl opened the door and you saw it opening to then closing. With planning on the prelim we didn’t do that much, we got an idea and stuck to it. With our final product we made sure that we did more for our planning in getting audience feedbacks, doing a pitch in front of a group with different age groups with 3 ideas to help us decide on one of them. We also did more of a story board for our final product to help with our planning. We had an idea of how we wanted to do our titles to make a difference compared to just plain text overlaid on the footage like we did in the prelim. By testing different transitions we could create an effect and make the titles completely different to what people would think of.

story boards

For our final product we could have improved on maybe getting different music for each of the clips or an extra sound for when it goes into the flashback. Also, if we hadn’t of had the trouble of our actors before hand, having to get new ones and having to explain to them what our idea was. On the day the overall filming was very successful. When we were editing the footage we had hardly any problems. The only issue was how we wanted to speed up the sunrise so that it moved faster but on Imovie it has a limit as to how fast we can do it so it didn’t speed up enough for how we wanted it to be.

This screen grab shows how we have used the rule of thirds to create this shot for the composition. The hands are positioned in the centre of the screen with not so much going on around it.

This wordle shows everything that I have learnt over this whole task on the different aspects of audiences, thrillers, conventions, camera skills and editing skills.