Q8 Looking back at your perliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

THE JOURNEY

 Animatic Prelim

 http://thriller11group11.blogspot.com/2011/01/animatic-preliminary-exercise.html
 This is a video of our first idea and we decided to do it with jelly babies. We roughly produced the ideas we had in mind and created a small story line.

  Initial Idea -Final Prelim

http://thriller11group11.blogspot.com/2011/02/final-preliminary.html

This is the final prelim where I'm acting, we manged to this effectively and I think that the animatic prelim helped us a lot as we knew what we wanted to do and how we were going to film it for example all the shots and the different angles.

 Final Prelim for our new idea
http://thriller11group11.blogspot.com/2011/03/practice-run.html 
  When beginning to plan the opening to our thriller we decided that our initial idea was not too good so we decided to change the storyline completely. This link shows our new idea.

Final Film- DEADLINE

This is our Final product which was put up on You tube. Me and my group felt very proud of our end piece as it's something that could be seen on an actual thriller  film. I don't think we fell in the trap of making it look a lot like a trailer. I am very pleased.

MISE EN SCENE

The first still shot is from our Prelim, the Mise en scene is not good as we did not really focus on how important it was. As it's seen, the actress is not dressed correctly for the storyline of the video. Also a table is used a bed, this could not be done in the final film. Alongside this, the objects in the background like a computer desk is not suitable for our storyline. The Mise en scene was not thought through properly and so made the footage look very 'cheesy' and unprofessional.

However,  the next still shot of from our final video. Immediately it's seen that the Mise en scene has improved a lot as the costume the actress is wearing has been chosen very well according to her persona such as the black dress and the scarf which plays a major role in the clip. You can't see very much of the surroundings but there is a bed and the objects go very well with the story line of the video.

EDITING

 This still shot taken from our Prelim is showing a match cut. We found it very hard to do match cuts and they looked very 'jumpy'. This was partly because we forgot to do the '5 second rule' where we left 5 seconds before filming the action. When editing this did not let us produce good match cuts so therefore the clip did not flow very well. 

After a few weeks, the still shot of our final film shows a PERFECT match cut, there are no jumps and so the clip flows smoothly. My teacher Mary said that the match cuts throughout the film were "FANTASTIC'. In order to produce better match cuts we made sure we followed the '5 second rule' and with some practice made the match cut a very good match cut!

I was pleased by the editing we were doing by then end of the unit.

LIGHTING

 Wow...the lightening looks extremely bad, it's very dark and you can hardly see what the actress is doing. This still from our prelim shows how our group did not think about the lightening needed. After seeing this clip we knew that when we done our final film the lightening had to be very good in order for our film to look good and professional.

After doing the prelim we changed the lightening, this second still is from our final video. As it's seen the lightening is much better, the audience can actually see what is in the clip. We used a small headlight camera which we placed on top of the camera so that it could bring the audience to focus on the objects. The prelim helped our group to understand that lightening is very important for a thriller film.

CAMERA

 Here is a still shot from the prelim. In our prelim we had a lot medium shots and longs shots which did not make the film very suspenseful. There was not enough drama going on in this prelim and it was due to the lack of  different camera shots. Our teacher also said that we didn't have enough angles to make our film flow nicely but still making it look suspenseful.

This second still shot from our final film, is close up the shoes the actress puts on. Close ups are the shots that the prelim lacked on. After seeing the final film we realised that a variety of shots made the film look a lot better and certainly A LOT more suspenseful, once again the prelim helped us to produce a better film

SOUND

 As it's seen on the videos from the links above, our prelim had no sound on it which made the whole video very, very boring! Without good sound a film opening is not effective. We certainly understood that sound was something important to put on our final film. We were not going to make the same mistake again.

The second still shot is from our final film, the very suspenseful and 'creepy' sound as many described was very effective for our video. It ends the film with suspense and makes the audience want to know what will happen next. From many of the feedback we got from our class mates the most common thing said was that the sound was very good as it creates a lot of suspense. I feel really happy with the sound we put on our film because we manged achieve the main goal which was to make it very suspenseful for the audience... to make them be sitting on the edge of their seats.

TITLES

In this still shot from our prelim there are no titles, we did not have time to do the titles but we realised that they were important in order to make our film look realistic. The prelim looked almost incomplete without any titles.

However, the second still shot taken from our final film has titles. Instantly the video looks a lot more professional, like a real opening to a thriller.

FINAL EXPERIENCE

Well, there is so much to say of how much I've learned these past few weeks. From camera shots to sophisticated technology to working in a team! Even though sometimes it was very stressful and overwhelming the whole journey was very fun. Sometimes I thought we were not going to be able to our film, but I was wrong. My group have managed to produce a good final product incorporating everything that we have learned. I've had a lot of fun and will not mind doing it all over again following the feedback and suggestions given to me by teachers and students in my class. I have a lot of new knowledge which will help me in the future.