EVALUATION QUESTION SEVEN

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

The technical skills I learnt whilst making our preliminary task and used in our final opening are all the skills I have in terms of using using various shot types, camera angles, lighting and editing. The shot types that were used in our preliminary task were heavily influenced by other symmetrical camera shots from film such as those by Wes Anderson, however we were aware that the shot types needed to be varied and so included a low angle shot, some mid-shots, long-shots and tracking shots throughout. 
 

Preliminary task

Final thriller opening

The tracking shots used in our 
prelim were mostly used in our thriller opening as we felt they gave the most narrative and allowed the audience to follow the characters easily. The tracking shots for both also used the rule of three, as we felt this was the best framing to use in order to keep our audience focused on our character whilst also revealing the surroundings of our film. 

Another shot type we used and learnt from making our prelim was the mid shots that included our character placed in the middle of the screen. We decided to use this shot again, it created an aesthetically pleasing shot and gave our film an order surrounding the chaos of the plot. The mid-shot was an simple shot that we could use to simply establish characters and surroundings without any difficulty. 

The framing of our thriller film was quite simplistic as we did not think of it as much as for our preliminary, because we wanted to focus on the story- a feature our preliminary task hardly had. 
The lighting in our preliminary task was used to juxtapose the action we tried to present. With the warming candlelit Cathedral light against the possible story of a drug deal we felt this was the best way to present something out of the ordinary however for our thriller opening we realised this would not work. Our preliminary task,

due to the lighting and opposing atmosphere,created a documentary-like atmosphere rather than the thriller one we were looking for, and so for our thriller film we stuck to a natural lighting using the time of the day - evening with grey/blue lighting- as a pathetic fallacy to try and portray the emotions of our characters and the eerie plot. 

The editing for the preliminary task was fairly simplistic and required minimal experimentation, because we had filmed everything as we wanted it, there was no need to flip any shots, alter the colour or add any sound. This was different for our thriller opening as all of these features were needed due to the difficulties we had with re-filming and the clarity of the story. The preliminary task did help however for us to understand Premier Pro slightly better and therefore we could experiment with colour alteration and flipping the shots. (EDITING SCREENSHOT)
No editing techniques were used in our preliminary task such as cross-fades or fade outs as we felt it didn't need too much to in order to explain the story. The thriller opening did use some editing techniques such as: Cross fades for the flashbacks, fade to black for the ending and the sound needed to be faded in and out. These techniques were not too difficult to do after we had already learnt the basic editing techniques from our preliminary task. 
The sound for both films was difficult at first due to the lack of an external mic. This made the diegetic sound in both very quite and although this is a fixable problem within the editing program we still had trouble. Each sound clip, as mentioned in the previous post, would attach together and make it difficult to adjust the sound levels for specific sound clips. 

Through working on both our prelim and thriller opening I have learnt that working to s specific brief is fine although it does make it difficult die to the fact that there are restrictions with the amount of film, the genre and the shots we could use although it did help to keep the opening purposeful. This was a feature we found difficult to accept after the freedom of the prelim task. The generic conventions played a huge part in this, because our preliminary task held no genre or subject, we could use whichever shots and locations we felt were the most enjoyable rather than the ones that fitted the genre or style the best. The specific guidelines did help to eliminate the threat of our film merging genres however as our preliminary task seemed to do. 
The research and planning throughout both films was highly important and I feel the amount of research we had done for our thriller opening really helped us to decide on specific things within the film such as the camera movement coming from the research on the camera work in 'Psycho' or the non-diegetic and diegetic sound from the research of the sound in the film 'Sin-City'.