Q7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Looking back to two months ago when we created a preliminary task I feel that I have improved my technical and production skills a lot since then. When doing my prelim we were getting a feel for using the media equipment that we hadn’t used before. Our planning before hand was very rough in comparison to our thriller, we did a very simple, six scene story board before going out to film and that was it. Whereas in conjunction with all the other planning our story board for ‘The Last Minute’ was a 22 scene, detailed walk through of our idea. 

At these points during our preliminary task we see very unsteady camera shots, although a tripod was used it unfortunately made no difference, we believe that this happened because whilst on the tripod we also tried to hold it securely at the same time. We made sure for our main product that this did not happen again and we let it be a lesson to us, which is visible, moreover when we became more confident after editing our prelim for the first time on imovie, we learnt how to stabilize our clips for the main thriller opening task which also helped us to gain steadier/smoother footage.

By becoming more confident we advanced with our equipment, for the preliminary, we shot our footage with a Sony Handycam yet for the full product we used a Cannon 550D DSLR HD camera, which not only improved the resolution and quality of our footage, but also meant we had the option to shoot incredibly detailed close ups and play with the manual focus, to focus on one thing, then another, within the one shot.

Although not seen in our final preliminary, we did have to reshoot a scene because of a continuity error, we had left a camera bag in the corner of one of the shots, then when we realised and removed it, suddenly it vanished into thin air when it came to editing. Before shooting any shots for our thriller we made sure that everything we wanted or, didn’t want in the scene was placed/removed and not messed with untill we were sure that we had got all the footage we needed. Including the photographs that had been strategically placed.

With our preliminary, our shot reverse shot is incredibly basic, whereas with our thriller opening it’s one of the climax’s, where we use it rapidly to show Harry’s panic and shock horror.