Task 7

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

We have all learnt so much from when we first began with our preliminary task. In the beginning when filiming our preliminary everything was very simple and we were given a storyboard and an idea and all we had to do was follow it and film a few simple shots. Our actual thriller was a lot more complicated and it showed me how much we have learnt when I looked back at our preliminary task. We had to think about so much more ourselfs and it was a lot more difficult creating our own story board from nothing. We had to think about each different shot and each camera angle and why it was there and what it portrayed, whereas before we would have just picked up the camera knowing very little about it and filmed our simple sequence. We also paid a lot more attention to continuity as we were using the same actor to play both parts, and this made our filming a lot more complicated. We also learnt to use a lot more complicated shots and things such as focus pulls and pans. All of these made our thriller a lot better than our simple preliminary task. We also began to pay more attention to what was in our frame, and which way our actor was looking and where they were standing in the shots, and this was completly different to our preliminary task where we filmed the shots we were given, so for our actual thriller we had a lot more creative freedom. We have now been studying Media for almost a year and so our knowledge on good camera angles and effective shots has developed greatly and I think that your are able to see this very clearly and notice the dramatic devlopment between our preliminary task and our thriller.

Our use and knowledge on how to use sound has developed a lot. In our perliminary task we didn’t have any music and we didnt need any Foley work and this made our editing process a lot easier as we just had simple dialogue which was easy to edit. So when we had to use Soundtrack Pro for our thriller it was a very different experience editing it. We used some origional sound from the shoot day and then we created some music using Soundtrack Pro so that our film had some non-diagetic sound.

I have also begun to notice a lot more and pay attention to shots and camera angles when i watch a film and I think that this is reflected in our thriller as we have all become a lot more experienced in many different ways since our preliminary task. Our knowledge and creativity has impoved massivly, this can all be noticed throughout our thriller. Our technical ablity has also impoved we are now all very capable of using Final Cut pro, Soundtrack pro and other editing programs which when we began with our preliminary task we were all very unsure of. We also learnt that if you want to make it in the movie making business you have to be extreamly organised and have great time management and this is one thing that we have learnt after our preliminary task, when we began our prelim we were all unorganised and unprepared and this effected our work so by the time that our thriller came around we were all prepeared and have done so much better and created something we can all be proud of.