Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you think you have learnt from the progression from it to the full task?

During the Preliminary task we learnt how to thoroughly plan our shot lists and storyboards which help is with our pre-production work. It also helped us to easily choose the genre for our thriller, which was a dramatic thriller.

The story line was then discussed. During the preliminary task we learnt what needed to be conveyed through each shot to show that dramatic thriller therefore we used a variation of light and dark locations to show conflicting futures. The locations then needed to be discussed and what we learnt from our preliminary task helped us because we were able to see how effective locations would be and how the mese-en-scene would be portrayed.

We learnt how to fit the character to our films genre comparing to our preliminary task. In our preliminary task we learnt that costume could be an effective instrument to give the product a sense of realism. We had to research our films genre before starting filming in order to know what the conventions are. We found that thrillers are a sub genre for horror.

Learning from our shot list we had to change some scenes that were impractical and didn’t fit with the themes. This was a repetition of what we did in the preliminary task. An example of this is we were going to have the main character meeting during a flash back but we did not find it very effective and it also went more towards a romantic genre rather than a thriller. The majority of our product was filmed outside which is a contrast to the preliminary task since it was only done inside. We took our lighting into great consideration we chose to have our final task predominantly does with natural lighting because it would create a great contrast to the flashbacks because there is very little lighting which gives it a creepy look. We did this because in our preliminary task we used unnatural lighting, which didn’t work very well. During our final task we only used non-diegetic sound and all the sound is post-production, whereas during our preliminary task the sound was all diegetic. During our final product we learnt how to use garage band to make the soundtrack to give our film atmosphere.

During our preliminary task we learnt how to use final cut which we were again able to use during our final task. From our preliminary task we learnt how to use the 180° rule which was useful to make our film look realistic and effective. If we had not used this rule our footage would not run smoothly.

Overall a lot of the skills we learnt from our preliminary task were useful. We learnt how to use a variety of camera angles and learnt how to effectively represent genres.