What have you learnt in progression from your preliminary to your final product?

PlanningWhen we filmed our preliminary task, we were able to film it within one lesson of media. This was obviously beneficial to us as it got us used to what we would have to do for our final coursework, however, we may have become too confident and not realised the necessity of planning the product. We then realised when filming our opening, that planning was an essential part of the sequence.

During our planning, we learnt how to embed important conventions such as enigma and music types to ensure that people are aware of our film being part of the thriller genre.

The storyboard enabled us to follow our ideas step by step, so we were not contemplating and arguing about what should come next as we had already agreed on the steps in the process of making our storyboard and animatic.

Continuity Editing

During our preliminary; continuity editing was more simple compared to our final product as it did not have as much footage, and the footage that it did contain was not as action packed as our final opening. Furthermore, there were less camera shots and angles, so continuity was not as vital in this preliminary task. Despite our preliminary not involving many clips, we still accidentally cut off some of the shot as we were unaware of this problem at the start so we did not recognise it.

In our preliminary, it was a requirement that it included match-on-action, the 180degree rule and shot-reverse-shot, so these were all included in our very first task. However, not many of these shot types were needed in our final product as there was no dialogue in our opening. However, we did include match-on-action occasionally, as well as the 180 degree rule.

Equipment Confidence

I feel that at the beginning of our coursework, our whole group was anxious about using the equipment as it is something that we had not done before. After filming the preliminary, I feel that it boosted our confidence slightly and then at the end of our final piece, we were all confident of how to operate the camera, tripod, lights etc.

How successful do you feel your end product is?

Personally, I feel that our final product is fairly successful in meeting the required criteria. I believe that despite hitting some obstacles, during the process, we managed to overcome the majority of them by working together and asking for assistance when we couldn’t figure it out independently.I think that our group was effective in the editing process as well as making our opening similar to other official thriller films.