Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
First of all, when we came to do out preliminary task, we only had one double lesson to plan, film and edit which came to a total time of 1 hour 50 minutes. This is a very short time to perfect the product that we made so it has many flaws. Also, at the time of making the prelim, we had very little knowledge of the film world and what makes a good film. I will now look through both products and see what improvements we made from beginning to our final cut.
At the very start of making our prelim and the actual film opening, we had to discuss with our groups to come up with a good idea. For the prelim, there were certain requirements the film had to meet, these included dialog and some different camera shots like close ups, so our ideas were limited. Also we only had about 5-10 minutes to come up with this idea because we didn't have much time. On the other hand, we had about a whole weekend to think of separate ideas and then discuss to our group. Not only this, we also had to tell our idea to the class to see how an actual audience would react and to get some feedback to maybe improve our idea. Some class feedback helped and changed the shape of our film.
Then for the prelim, we went right into filming after this stage but for our thriller opening we didn't film for another 2-3 months. This is because we had so much other stuff to do that will also help us for making our film. For example, we researched other thriller opening to see how and why they are effective using the many thriller conventions. We then had to learn these are try to include them in our film. Also the use of lighting, camera angles and in general how to use the camera better. From all the research that we did, i learnt that a lot more goes into the stage before making the film than i previously thought. One of the most important things we did was making the storyboard for our film, this is key as it planned out the whole film so we had a better understanding of how it would look and when it comes to filming we would already know what shots we need. All these things mentioned above were not done for the making of our prelim and that made the thriller opening a better final product.
While filming the prelim, we made many mistakes and it looked very sloppy, but we didn't have the time to go back and change them so we had to deal with it. Here are some example of were we went wrong while filming:
In the bottom right, you can see our camera bag and some other equipment in the shot that we should have moved away.
In this shot, we can see two peoples reflections in the mirror which shows they are behind me
But in the next shot, there is no one behind me...
In this shot you can clearly see that there is a tripod set up in the background, this is sloppy camera work and just quite simply bad positioning.
As i am walking away, you can see another group trying to film in the background, what makes this worse is that, i was just there a couple seconds ago in the video and they were not there.
Those are the mistakes you can see visually, but we also made a mistake with the sound. This is because we filmed this while there was a PE class next door so the noise was very loud and it was sometimes hard to hear. Also in the first shot of me walking it was very light outside but when i walked past the pillar it want very dark so lighting was a problem and there was too much of a contrast. We fixed all of these problems in our final thriller opening as we had so much time to perfect it and took our time when recording. Also if we done a bad shot we went back to redo it.
While filming the prelim we used many shot types but we didn't use them very well. As you can see in the picture, during the dialog we used shot reverse shot which is ok but the lighting is very bad as its too bright. Half of Liam's face is white and due to him being quite far away from the camera its harder to hear him also. The 180 degree rule was also broken slightly when me and Liam were talking as it cut back to a front angle. At the time we didn't know we did this and we probably should have done the shot reverse shot from the other side of our faces as it would have worked better and it wouldn't be as light.
In our thriller opening we broke the 180 degree rule very effectively as it gives the audience a clearer picture of the characters surrounding. This is a vast improvement from the prelim as the in that the 180 degree rule had no effect and it was hardly noticeable unlike this one.
We also included the characters point of view in one shot so we could try to put the audience in his shoes so they experience it more.
Finally, the editing process, for the prelim we only had about 40-30 minutes editing depending on how fast we finished filming and this was quite short but we got the job done. Arguably the editing was a bit sloppy and the transition behind the pillar wasn't very good but at that point i was remotely new to Final Cut Pro and didn't know how to use it very well. When the editing for our final product came around i was a lot more familiar with the software learnt quite a few techniques. This enabled me to get the flashback looking effect and the continuity editing was very well done. We had 1-2 weeks to complete the editing so i was able to go back and add things if i had forgotten them or to make it better.
In the end i felt a lot more confident with the equipment and i think it led to us making a better final product. This is because we were able to use them to their full potential really show the thriller genre through our 2 minute opening. We have came a long way as a group and i can see how much our skills have progressed over these past months.
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