Evaluation Task 7

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

 In my opinion, the most useful aspect of the prelim was learning how to use the camera correctly and the different filming techniques. Before the prelim I had no real experience with filming at all, at the beginning of this excercize, one of the media teachers taught me exactly how to use the camera including the zoom, the focus, the use of the tripod and the angling of shots. This was incredibly helpful because considering I had been absent for the lessons in which these skills had been taught and therefore meant I could really get involved in the prelim and develp my new skills.

 There is a massive difference between the camera work in our prelim and the Tents Thriller. This was largely influenced by the fact that we were a lot more experienced and knew what shots looks good and learnt rules such as the 180 degrees rule. This experience means that the final piece looks a lot more professional and realistic, similar to what you would see in a real film. You can see in from my prelim that there is some poor camera work. One example of this is when the camera is moving mid shot to focus on the rubiks cube. The camera is very unsteady and shaking around, it looks as if it was being filmed on a mobile phone and incredibly unprofessional. This is different to our thriller as we were effectively using the tripod and the majority of the shots were still shots. The moving shots were difficut to perfect but we took a few goes shots of each, to make sure we got a good one.

 There is no comparison between the Mise-En-Scene in the prelim and in our thriller. In the prelim we only used a stool and a rubiks cube and 2 actors. For our Thriller we spent months planning the setting and props. This included the tent, the wood boarded windows, sleeping bag, tins and plastic containers, rope, and an axe. This is only to name a few. Also condsidering for our prelim we didnt need to worry about unwanted light and sound coming into the shot as we were in a studio, this was different for our thriller as we were in a normal boarding house so we had to board up the windows to show that it wasn't sunny outside. Considering we had a lot much more to do, I feel we successfully made it look professional.

 Through illness, I never actually got the oppertunity to edit the prelim but the amount I have learnt about editing since working on the thriller has been unbelievable. It has been hours worth of work and have been largely influenced by the likes of Kyle Cooper and the Spiderman 3 opening title sequence. As a group I have found one of the most interesting aspects of editing would be adding in the titles and choosing the font and the design of the text. For example fading the writing in and out rather than suddenly. In our piece we also had the titles ride along the lines, very similarly to the Spiderman 3 extract.

 To be honest, in our prelim we hardly took the sound into consideration, we just filmed it and allowed the camera to pick up and dialogue as this was the only sound used in this piece. This is largely different from the Thriller as we used separate microphone booms to pick up important specific sounds such as the bell ringing and and door handle twisting. This also means we will be able to edit it to make them sound louder than they would have done if we didn't uses it. This added dramatic effect.