Question 7

Since I have done my preliminary task, I believe that I as a media student have developed my skills and techniques. I now find it easier to be more professional with how I setup shots:

Here we see a shot from my prelim, on the left and a shot from my thriller production, on the right. Here is a clear example of being able to set up effective shots. When we filmed our prelim we quickly set up this shot and we didn’t leave anything out, so we hand no sense of mystery, we said that it was long shot and that is all we thought about. Whereas in your thriller production, in the shot on the right, when we set up this shot we thought about all of the elements for example the prop placements, the lighting, the angle of the shot, the camera rules like the rule of thirds we tried use these, how steady it was and making sure nothing in the shot would damage the theme of our film. As you can see on our prelim doesn’t look very thrilling, if I did it again I may have taken the bin out or maybe even crop out the building on the left, because it doesn’t really fit the thriller genera.

And how I edit:

When I began editing I really thought about how professional the shot looks. On the left you can see a shot from my thriller opening, it has only got one effect, which darkens the edges of the screen/shot so that it looks gloomy and follows typical thriller films. Whereas the shot on the right is from my preliminary, we wanted to make it look like CCTV but because we used so many effects of it, it doesn’t look professional. Also in the editing of the thriller opening I took into account of the timing, so that it matches the music. In the prelim I didn’t do this. I believe I can now effectively edit clips.

We also improved on our typography skills. The shot on the left shows the opening sequence example; we created our own typography in Photoshop and imported it into iMovie. This looked a lot more professional than the standard typography that comes with iMovie as you can see on the right.

My preliminary was ok, its story was good, but could be changed to be a better production and the editing was good as well, but some of the shots went on too long. Our lighting was actually typical of a sci-fi thriller, but some of the audience found the effects confusing and over used. This was a different case for our thriller opening sequence we used a good amount of lighting effects. Also our use of mise-en-scene has improved massively, in our prelim we just filmed, where as in the open sequences we thought about how each shot was going to be setup, for example where were the props going to go? What costumes are the characters wearing? And the positioning of the shot?

We have improved a lot of skills and techniques. In our prelim we had feedback of the camera not being steady, this is something we corrected straight away when filming our thriller opening, to maintain a professional look. Our editing skills are much better; we can now easily edit clips to be able to create a professional looking product. Continuity was a big problem in our prelim; we fixed this for our thriller opening. We have improved our use of the 180 degree rule, we only used it in one shot in our opening, it was the shot when the protagonist walks along the dirt covered ledge, but we have also practised it. Now we  can use it effectively.

When we first started planning out opening made a list of ideas individually and then we can together as a group to discuss the best ideas and the ideas we liked. We decide on a thriller about a person on the run from the police for being wrongly accused and he has to find out the truth. From there on we went and made a story board and annotated it. Once we sorted the storyboard out we then decided create a detailed shot list, to help us when filming. Once we had filmed we began to edit the footage, we all had in put in the editing process. Because we all had an input we were all happy with our final product.

The location we choose was very typical of thriller/horror films, we filmed in and around a wood. And the shots that could be seen as dangerous where filmed at home as the risk assessment says.

At first when it was raw footage I believe it was bad. But once we finished editing I was very happy with the end result, I think that our thriller opening sequence is very successful. We did have a good amount of shots but I still think we could have added more. I liked the quality of the camera we used but when we exported and upload the video it got compressed making it looked ever so slightly pixelated, which I was slightly disappointed by. Another problem was that it was quite difficult to get the text we had created on Photoshop on to the video and when we put it on the video would crash, this was hard to work with but once we exported it was fine. But I believe that out thriller opening followed many typical thrillers and it looked quite professional in my opinion.  

Here you can see our continuity editing has improved from theses shots. The thriller opening shots show the continuity as correct with the same shoes walking over the newspaper. But whereas in the prelim Zak and Conor are running and then in a different shot they have swapped sides. Overall we have improved massively  since our preliminary.