Looking back at your preliminarly task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
By georgialewis
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Opening to the thriller genre
at the begining of the course, we started by looking at the thriller genre as a whole. I created a research powerpoint into thrillers showing the different sub genres of thrillers and the typical characters and narrative conventions etc. This was useful as it gave me lots of insights into thrillers and therefore was a big help when it came to thinking up ideas for my own thriller. -
Group work
In the OTS we delegated rolls quite easily based on previous skills and who wanted to do what. I was the main actor, Sonam was the director, Katie was the editor and Remy was the cameraman, although we all helped eachother with their rolls from time to time. The group work was rewarding as we got to know eachother well and worked really well together although it became difficult at times due to someone not being present or clashing ideas. -
preliminary exercise - continuity filming and editing
We were randomly allocated into groups of 4 and our first task to complete was the 'preliminary exercise'. This was basically an inroduction to the concepts and practical application of continuity filming and editing. The prelim was a really short film in which we had to demonstrate the '180 degree rule', 'match on action' and 'shot reverse shot'. -
Prelim
As i was new to filming i had to learn these continuity filming and editing concepts from scratch. Meaning that the only way i fully understood them was once i had used the concepts practically and completed them in our prelim and edited them together. -
Prelim
Our preliminary task started off to be quite difficult as we had just got together as a group and no one was really coming up with any hard ideas. Although we didnt come up with an amazing ending, we did end up with a well filmed piece which included all the shots needed as well as some really nice looking long shots of katie walking from the end of the corridor towards the camera. -
prelim
As well as the filming techniques we also had to learn some more skills for the preliminary exercise. These included group work, delegation of tasks and roles, planning and storyboarding. Although i was already quite familiar with some of these, the preliminary task allowed me and the others in my group a chance to adapt on these skills and by the end of it i felt that i had learnt alot about them. -
prelim
Overall the preliminary task that our group completed was really useful as it gave us the opportunity to build on the vital skills that we needed later on in our opening sequence. -
Planning our Opening Title Sequence (OTS)
Now that our group was familiar with eachother and with the skills to bare in mind, we began to plan our film. I came up with the initial idea of making a film about a missing child, and we then all contibuted by adding more of a story to that idea. Once we were all happy with our final idea for the whole film, we began to plan our OTS. -
Usefulness of planning
We started to plan with more of a film makers eye, now that we had learnt alot about thrillers we thought of good conventional images and shots to sketch in our storyboards. When it came to filming we were very thankful that we had planned using storyboards,recces,shot lists and costume and props ideas because it meant that we were organised and got things done quickly and correctly. -
Filming day 1
When it came to filming, although we had planned well, we didnt know the full layout of the location we were filming at (Brighton Pier) and therefore it became apparent that maybe this wasnt the best area to film in after all. This was mainly due to people walking around in the background there wasnt much of a logical way we could show the daughter being abducted from her mother in that environment. -
Filming day 2
when we got back to the editing suite and had a look a the film from our first filming day, we decided we definitely needed to shoot again in a different location. We chose Holingbury park. We storyboarded our OTS again and went to do our second filming day. With our knowledge of continuity filming and shot types and sizes in general we were able to create a good variety of shots. -
Filming day 2
The shots im most proud of are the long shots of the swing as it looks really surreal. I think they are really effective and work well with the thriller genre. we did not use the 180 degree rule in our piece as in the part of the OTS where there is conversatiowas it was not needed,nor did we use much of shot reverse shot. However we did use match on action when swapping from shot to the next for example when the womans phone rings and it cuts to her picking it up in another,closer shot. -
Editing
The editing was mainly done by katie, although the rest of our group helped out sometimes. We found that our previous experience with editing our prelim became useful when editing together our OTS. With regards to the continuity editing, remembered from the prelim, we made sure we edited the match on action shots correctly so that they made sense. -
effects and editing transitions
Because we had more time to edit, unlike in the prelim, we were able to explore with editing transitions. We ended up using fade to black as we didnt want anything too distracting taking the audiences mind off the eventful narrative of the OTS. We didnt use many effetcs appart from changing the colour hugh so that it best fittet the mood of the different shots and scenes. -
Fourteen years
I think our end product was reasonably successfull. I really liked our ideas but i think we needed some more time filming as there were a few unfixable errors in our OTS. For example in one of our vital shots the camera was moving. Due to the fact that we had already filmed our whole OTS again we didnt really have the time to go and do little bits of filming. For future reference i am going to bare in mind that i need to test the location before filming. -
improving skills
Overall i think during the coursework period my skills and knowledge of film making has really improved as i have learnt loads of new terms, editing techniques and general knowledge of filming that i didnt know before.
