Stephen- Evaluation Question 7

Developing on from the Preliminary task to the Main task

On reflection upon the Preliminary task, there are many things that stick out as being 'wrong' in a way; or simply not worth being included- and there's a lot of things that I would put into it given the chance. Subsequently, I know that I have, personally, learned a lot from the beginning of the Preliminary to the end of our Main task. I know I have developed my skills further from what they were at the beginning of the college year; and I also know that I will continue to improve with each piece of work I do.

Camera-work

The Camera work was the thing that, I believe, we improved on the most. Thankfully we never forgot to set the white-balance on the cameras, so all our shots were good in that aspect. However, in our preliminary task we had a few shots out of focus, like this one (The first shot of our Preliminary task):

Out of focus!

The shot shows Ben's character (Something I'll pick up on later) as being out of focus for no good reason. It distorts the shot unnecessarily resulting in something that looks rather ugly. In our main task we only had one shot that was out of focus; and it was done intentionally as to distort the shot and put is in Geoff's perspective; unclear and uneasy. Additionally, the shot in question was a graphic-match; something that we didn't use in our Preliminary (And something that we definitely would use again, being more confident in our camera-work.)

Out of focus to show Geoff's emotional instability

Sound

Our sound for the preliminary was good; we learnt where to add Foley effects and where to increase the sound to crescendo. From what we learnt in the Preliminary we moved to the Main task; resulting in a seamless music piece which flowed throughout the film (With one change in beat in the brief fight scene.) From reviews of the film, I have gathered that while some aspects of the sound were good, others were bad. The fast-paced drum beat was in stark contrast with the rest of the music and it didn't go too well with some people; though others liked it as well. From this, I know now to keep the music in our next piece relevant and not in too much contrast (Unless we find a way to make it seamlessly flow.)

Music gives the audience a shock surprise! (even though it's annoying)

Setting

The setting of the project changes drastically. The preliminary was set in college, we weren't fully confident in our abilities to film outside of it, where we would have had an extra scene in a McDonalds. All our shots ended up being taken inside of College, not creating a good ambience for the film.

 However, for our main task we went all out. We filmed in a Graveyard and in a nearby nature reserve; both with permission from the owners. These new settings proved much harder to film it; getting the light level the same in the changing day was the most difficult. However, the end result was perfect; with the cold breath showing clearly creating a much more ominous scene. Below is a video of all our locations for the main task:

Plot

Our preliminary task had no set plot. It was just us testing our camera work and knowledge of all aspects of filming. None of our characters even had proper names, Changing from that to an entire plot of a film was very difficult (Thankfully, two of us had experience writing story lines so it was easier than it was first made out to be.)

We chose ordinary names that you'll hear day-to-day, to make the film more realistic and in doing so making the film more thrilling, giving the audience the feeling that it could happen to anyone-even them. Our plot as fully built around the stages defined by Gustav Freytag. Our opening shows the exposition and the inciting incident; leaving the viewer to watch more in order to feel at-ease with the cliffhanger we left before we cut to the title. On the contrary, the preliminary assessment didn't follow Freytag's rules, instead going from exposition to the climax with no full understanding of how it happened.

Editing

Our preliminary film had little amounts of editing done. It featured sound editing and basic cuts. The sound had very little editing done to itself; just around other parts, and it feature a single edited crescendo. To look back on the editing of our preliminary click here

Our thriller opening was much more diverse and complicated. To begin with, we named all of our footage to make each shot easier to work with. We also labelled them with colours to show the locations of the shots. When this was done it was far simpler to edit together the film, without wasting time looking through each shot for which was good and not so good.

From techniques learnt from the preliminary film, we over-layed several sounds to create a good music effect. With different Foley sounds being added at different points it is easy to see how precise we needed to be. To ensure the sound was going in the right place, we also labelled the Foley and Recorded sounds with the same colour as the shot.

Additionally, we had ambient sound to make sure it wasn't only music and voices; something we did not feature in the Preliminary, and it's something that worked out rather well- making the scenes much more eerie. To see our thriller editing blog post click here

Prelim audio and video

Main task audio and video

Conclusion

 Looking at the work seen in our Preliminary task it is obvious how far we have come. We have developed several skills; sound editing was the most obvious. We have each grown more confident in the use of cameras. Our lighting was spot on in the preliminary and it continued over to the main task; proving that we learnt what to do with lighting from experience. I have also developed skills that will prove useful: I have developed my skills with a camera from being out of focus most of the time to using focus pulls efficiently.