Evaluation task 7 / Looking back at you preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

We filmed our pre-lim task in the edit suite, we had to find a space were the background wasn’t too confusing, and there wasn’t to much noise that the camera would pick up on, and since we didn’t have a gun-mice or anything like that the camera would pick up on all sound.

To prepare for the pre-lim we were given a storyboard with different shots which we had to follow, to give us something steady that we could rely on. In the different shots there were to people with speech bubbles, we were aloud to mix up the shots so we could first do over the shoulder shot and then another one from the other side if we wanted to. 

Then we had to set up the camera, where we had to balance the white balance, and make sure the right focus was on. Since the pre-lim was in a small space with basic shots it made it easier to move the camera around and give yourself good time. Also while filming you have to make sure that there are enough shots to edit so you can make it all hang together, for example we had someone walking through a door, so first we filmed behind him with hand held camera, the half shot from the front and a close up on the door closing so we kept the continuity throughout the whole video. In the editing process, I didn’t find it that hard because we had a lot of help from the storyboard we were given and the little plan we had done for shots before we started filming. We learnt the basics as choosing a video file and cutting some of that out and putting it down on the bottom line. We were taught how to trim off the edges of clips wants they already had been cut once.

The main task to create a thriller was much more difficult, first we had to brainstorm our own original idea, then put in a group and choose one. The next step we had to take was research our opportunities, for cast, props and location. We found it quite hard to find a space that could look like the idea we had of our location, because it had to resemble a military base/cell, we first had the idea of filming in our teachers garage that looked quite similar but then we found that the space would be quite difficult to film on so we decided to create our own location in the studio. This was quite risky because we had no idea what it was going to look like, before we had set it up. 

Then we had to do our entire storyboard which I found quite difficult because you have to know exactly what shots you want, and which ones you want to come before and after. We also had to write a time of seconds that we thought the shot would take, and give a small description of what we though would happen in the scene. This was very hard also despite the fact that we had no idea what our set up would look like so we figured that we would make one, but maybe not stick with it 100 procent. Our filming was also very different from the pre-lim task because we had to adjust the light constantly because our set was very dark, then we had to have some in-action shots where the camera work had to be very fast, also because we had to make the shots fit together, so we have one shot that is shaken we have to mix it with another shot that is shaken and you have to think about those things in the moment, because it is to late when you are sitting in the editing room and is missing shots. We also ended up filming much more different than we had actually planned in our story board, but what we did was take our story board and take an iphone to start with, the when everything had been up we took pictures as a through line of the story so we had those pictures to follow.

The editing process for our thriller was much more difficult because it was a much larger project and we had many more clips, to choose from, than we had in the prelim. Therefore we learnt how we could give the clips different colours after which ones were good, bad, and the best which helped a lot in the area of knowing what to use and what not to. We could also rename the files as “Adams Reaction” so this also helped us when we had to return to different clips to cut more from them. We started out by making a rough cut, so we had the basic rough cut clips we needed in one place. Then we started deciding which shots had to go first, but we found that making some of the shots fit in with the other ones were quite difficult so we had to find some in-between shots we had taken to put in-between. Our sound was also different to our pre-lim in our prelim we only had diegetic sound of the characters and objects but in our thriller we had that as well but we also had a subtle “cave and wind” sound to make the atmosphere more realistic, as it would sound like in real life. In our thriller we also created special effects, so that there was actual gunfire from the guns, and so that when there is an attack towards the end there is the non diegetic sound of bombs and the special effect lights as well which were created on the program Adobe After Effects. And both the thriller and prelim was edited on Final Cut Pro and filmed with Sony nx5.