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

Looking back on my preliminary task I feel that I’ve improved much more on my thriller opening, more on editing and different shots than anything else. As our preliminary was a test run of the camera/editing equipment we went a bit over the top with our editing such as adding dramatic music for no reason and different transitions from every scene. This is problematic as it is not needed and makes the film look scratchy. Our thriller consists of as little editing as possible, mainly only using the same transitions throughout the film which we used fade to white/dissolve for the flashbacks. We also added a mystery sound effect that worked well with a thriller, but still worked effectively with the genre.

As we created a storyboard for our preliminary we thought we’d do the same for our thriller as it helped a lot in the progress of making the film. As a team we came up with a shooting script, narrative script and story boards for our final ideas of a thriller opening. This helped us in our organisation as we had a basic idea which we could add to, or change some scenes. Also for our thriller we planned the location, costumes, shots etc so we knew what we needed to include and how our thriller would plan out. We didn’t do this for our preliminary which was the reason why it wasn’t very successful in suiting the genre and idea behind it.

This planning acted as a starting point as we could change or add different ideas at any time. For example, we decided to add still images at the start and changed the colour to black and white. This was to create dramatic effect and it was different from other thriller openings.

The filming for our thriller went really well. The location was just right for a thriller and as we filmed at night it created a much tenser atmosphere with a eerie feel to it. When we got to the location and looked around we decided to change where we were going to film. We were originally going to film inside the building, but looking round outside we realised it was better facilities for a stalker. The actors we chose worked well, a young girl, showing emotion in the close ups and the masked man stalking the girl which turned out really effective in creeping out of the dark. I believe we got the characters played just right for our opening.

Some problems we had when filming was the battery life. We had to make sure we planned our time effectively and knew what we needed to do before the camera ran out from all the filming we did. We made sure it was fully charged as the start of the day and to save the battery we turned it off every shot. We did get all the clips just before it ran out, but if we had more battery we could have got some more effective shots from different camera angles. Another issue was the weather, it wasn’t a big issue but it affected our shooting. As they were high amounts of powerful wind, when the actors were speaking you couldn’t really hear them. We didn’t notice this until we got into editing but we overcame it by doing voiceovers. Apart from that everything else went well and we got a good amount of footage and effective shoots to create our opening. Our group worked well together which helped a lot and we all got the chance to add different ideas in to try out.

If I was to re-do this project I would make sure that we’d get a better variety of shots through each scene and make the editing process more effective as some bits are scratchy and we couldn’t redo any footage. As a whole I believe the whole of our group worked effectively and we all imputed our own ideas. We all had a chance with equipment such as the camera and the editing programme.

I thought our point of view shots worked effectively as it showed the audience the emotion on the character. It also shows how much power the person has and who is in control. It also adds mystery as the location is hidden so you can’t see where they are or how they got there.

From this image/shot you can tell the girl is in the middle of nowhere which adds to the tension and might give the audience questions of where is she going? The only issue I have with this scene is the lighting. We were trying to get the flashbacks to be filmed at night to add to the tension but it didn’t work. We tried darkening the picture but it different look as effective as you couldn’t see the background.

From looking back at our preliminary I feel like we have improved a lot in our skills. For example, our camera shots and how we frame them, the transitions used for our flashbacks to make them effective and the whole editing progress to create a tension thriller opening. For this production we didn’t go over the top with editing, but added more sharp scenes to create dramatic effect on the audience.

As you can see from these pictures we focused more on the detail of how the title was presented. As you can see from our thriller title we created a dramatic design with sharp colours to attract the audience. Also, the red hand represents blood so the audience will wonder where this film going. Doing this instead of a basic title gives the viewer a better involvement in the film.