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.
