Evaluation Question 7

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

When I look back at our preliminary task it is clear to me that a lot of improvements and progress has been made due to being able to gain more experience when filming and editing, whilst also looking out for mistakes that we may have made in our preliminary task, and we want to avoid when producing our thriller opening.

When beginning to plan our thriller opening we did a lot more research into other films this time in comparison to our preliminary task, this is because we wanted to make sure that what we were choosing as our storyline would be engaging for our audience and they will be intrigued by what they are watching. I researched into the codes and conventions of a thriller e.g. and adapted them to our groups ideas of what we wanted to do and film. We came to the conclusion that our thriller would be about a girl who was recently kidnapped by an unknown person, she is now trying to move on with her life but is struggling with the fact that she is frequently getting flashbacks of that traumatic time. Now has to face her worst fears as the flashbacks get more intense and the return of her kidnapper is daunting over her. We chose this as our storyline as we felt it would be gripping for our audience as they try to figure out who the mystery villain is and what they want from 'Lydia'. When doing the storyboard this time around I made sure it was much more detailed, this is because I wanted my group to be able to understand in more detail the outline of our idea for our opening, so when it came filming it would be easier for us to know what we were doing and what we had to film next.

From the practise we gained from our preliminary task we were able to improve our filming and editing skills, especially when it came to specific shot types. In our preliminary task we were able to film and edit a successful Match on action shot however it was clear that improvements could be made e.g. the shakiness of the camera. We had the opportunity to make these improvements as we had included a Match on action shot at the beginning of our park scene. Before filming this we made sure that the lighting was bright and directly shining on 'Lydia's' face as she walking through the gate. We still made it three individual shots that made up the whole Match on action shot however this time we used a tripod which solved our issue of the camera being shaky in our preliminary shot. In addition to this we made sure we kept to the 180 degree rule and whenever we did change what side we were filming from we would make a clear transition from one side to the other, e.g. at the beginning of the opening we see a pan, into a track across the from one side of the room to another, into a montage of shots. This would allow us to be able to change the side that we wanted to film on without confusing the audience. During our filming time we also found that a lot of shots we either changed or added as we felt it would be the most effective option for our thriller opening. We sure we had a variety of shots, this included; long shots, close ups, extreme close ups, two person shots, view point shots, mid shots etc. This is something I found would be important for our thriller in order to draw the audience in and make it more unique. Moreover, whilst filming we made sure to look out for small yet silly mistakes that were made in our preliminary task, for example; making sure my hair was kept the same throughout as in a lot of the scenes I our preliminary task my hair is different to the previous shot.

To conclude I believe that our end result of our thriller opening was successful because we were able to use a variety of shots to keep our opening interesting for our audience. In addition our editing was effective because we made a variety of slow cuts and shots for less intense scenes, we also have a lot of fast cuts for our flashback scenes as they are more suspenseful and intense for the audience.