Question 7

Q7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

During all the phases of our final production we have kept in mind what we learnt from our disastrous attempt at a preliminary task. We managed to get better at camerawork and editing.
The following shots show how we have applied the techniques that we learnt in class first in the preliminary task and then how we expended that knowledge into our final production. 

  This is the starting shot in our preliminary, it depicts a character in the moment of exiting the lift; we decided to use this shot as it was unusual and it leant an air of mystery to the character.

In this first shot of our final piece you can observe Connor walking through the graveyard to the gravestone. There are notable differences in the camera usage: for one the use of lighting is much better in the second image, this was done by actually shooting the film from a decent angle and not against the light as in the first one; this increases the sharpness of the image and makes it feel more polished and professional.

This shot is the beginning of the match-on-action shot that we incorporated into our preliminary: it’s simply a shot of the character’s hand approaching and grabbing the door handle and then a quick shot to the other side of the door to show that he’s going through.

This is the match-on-action shot present in our final piece: it depicts the killer hitting the victim with a stone; as you can see the quality of the camera is much better as we decided to forgo the provided cameras and arm ourselves with an HD camera. The shots are edited together to create a fast paced sequence, culminating with the victim being knocked out. Moreover we decided to not use any transitions in the sequence and just use a series of fast cuts that enhance the tension as opposed to the rather mellow version of the prelim that employed a cross-fade transition.

The main bulk of the prelim was the depiction of one of the characters walking down a corridor; this shot was rather long and was a real turn off for the viewer.

 

We found ourselves with a very similar problem in the final production: however we resolved the issue by accelerating the pace of an otherwise boring sequence by introducing fast cutaways of trains running, this links back into the theme of the film and jars the audience and is a clear foreshadow of what is to come later in the film. Moreover we turned the sound from these cutaways right up as loud as it could go to further accelerate the pace and force the viewer to pay close attention to the following, critical, shots.

This the over-shoulder shot that we had in our preliminary; however we didn’t take into consideration some aspects of the production: for example the lighting is really poor quality, resulting in a grainy effect on the film, also we didn’t notice at the time of filming that there were people around that accidentally got on film.

These are the shots from the actual production: as you can see the quality of the camera and the lighting is far superior to the prelim and looks polished and professional.

 During the filming aspect of our preliminary we made good use of the 180^* rule by filming our shots from the same side of the corridor and by not crossing the line.  

We ported that skill over to the actual production by keeping faithful to the rule, however we noticed that due to the relatively stationary shot in our preliminary it looked boring and static: consequently we decided to try and move up the action by using a different variety of shot angles and distances while remaining faithful to the 180^* rule.

Planning:
To try and make the final production look as good as possible we tried to plan every detail of the production before we filmed it. To this end we first found a good location for the production, a member of the group knew of a good place for our thriller and so we found it on Google Maps as shown in this image.
 

 Here you can see the filming location from an aerial prospective: this helped us to decide where to position the camera and the actors before actually visiting the location; by doing this we reduced the time it would take for us to get into position and thus increased the quality of our time management.