Question 7

Our performance in our preliminary task was solely an experience about being behind the camera, acting, speaking and trying different techniques. This task gave us some ideas about acting and what we could do in our final production. For example, what we could say, how we could say it and how we could perform in general. The preliminary task also allowed us to experiment with different camera shots and angles…

When our teachers had set us a task of the preliminary task, they said that we had to use three different camera shots in particular. These included: “Match on action”, “180 degree rule” and the “shot reverse shot”. By incorporating these into our preliminary task, it gave us ideas of how to improvise these simple shots and also come up with more advanced shots like “panning” during our final production. Camera work was also pretty shady on our preliminary task and was not as smooth as it could have been. Our “pans” needed to be slicker and our speech needed to be clearer. All this considered we took this experience and improved our camera work massively with smoother shot changes into our final production.

Editing is where a film is made. It determines if a film is going to be a success of a failure. Editing took the longest for use bearing that fact in mind. It was a good experience playing around with iMovie and including different transitions and sounds into our product. For example some sound had to be muted as there was excess background noise in the corridor. As we became more experienced in using iMovie we decided to experiment in our final production with background changes and light changes as well as drastically cropping some of our shots. Even myself who before had no experience at using iMovie, gained some skills that helped us to edit our film to perfection.

Our production could not have been done without each our team members playing a part. Everyone contributed to editing and camera work as well as researching sound effects and research into thriller conventions. Outside of the media course, we all get along very well, and this worked to our advantage. Lots of different ideas were switched around such as different shot types and even the title of the film, but every little detail was agreed upon. This meant we had no arguments and throughout filming the preliminary task up to finalising our complete product we all worked together perfectly.

Our team coped pretty well with audience feedback. We didn’t let it bother us as we created a survey via Survey Monkey, therefore the results were anonymous. We asked the question as research as what was people favourite genre. 12 out of 25 people between the ages of 15 and 75 said they preferred comedy. So we weren’t sure that people would pay attention. Another question we asked was if people preferred a subgenre in a film like aspects of horror in a thriller. Just under ¾ of people said yes to this one prompting us to include aspects of horror in our thriller. This can be seen in the huge knife and the blood stained shirt. Overall referring to audience feedback was helpful as it was a good general gauge of what real people wanted to see in our film.

STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES

Working as a team proved to be crucial, everyone inputting made our ideas broader and we able to pick a good plan to use

Editing was crucial. We made sure that everything was perfect including lighting, speed and sound

Our film itself proved to be a strength. We were happy how it looked, how it gave us a thrill and how much we had improves since filming our preliminary task.

We had the problem of nature. To give our film a vibe we decided to film at dusk. Unfortunately the camera was scared of the dark and even changing the lighting on iMovie made it difficult to see. We had to therefore change to filming in the day and turning the lighting down to make it seem like dusk.

The video camera had a woeful battery life and we needed to film our product in separate parts otherwise the camera would lose charge.

No, I’m not talking about what was in it for me here, I’m talking about

what I personally learnt about film making. I never paid much

attention to editing before. Endlessly trying to film everything

perfectly to then bang it all together and upload it to get views on

YouTube. Using iMovie, even just developing basic skills, opened up

a new world that I knew. I found out everything you could do to a film

could be done. Its almost like you could film something in 5 minutes

and spend the rest of the day editing. Obviously that isn’t what we

did, far from it actually but learning about editing and what can be

accomplished at the click of a few buttons really expanded my view

on film making. I loved making the film in general. Suggesting ideas,

editing the sound and being in front of the camera allowed me to be

free and enjoy myself. I hope I can continue media studies in the

future as it I something I thoroughly enjoy and making our

production, The Following has made me even more interested than

before.