Sunday, 4 March 2012

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

In comparing my preliminary task to my finished product, one can see that they are very different pieces. My preliminary task was a fairly unambitious attempt at a simple match-on-action and then short dialogue. It required very little planning or technical ability to complete. The final piece that we created, however, involved a great deal of planning and a lot more precision when it came to sound and lighting.


My prelim

Thus, one of the main things I have learnt from making my full product is how to plan such a project and the importance of planning to the project and its end result.The first thing we did was to research both what a thriller is and what other thrillers were like and how they were made. This involved watching the openings of multiple thrillers and also researching the production companies behind them. This gave us an idea of what kind of tone our thriller opening would have and how we would present it. We then began coming up with our film idea and constructing a plot before storyboarding it to see how we wanted to compose our shots and to gain a sense of how many shots we would need and how they would be edited and sequenced.


It was then time to go on a recce and it was then that we learnt the importance of proper reconnaissance as we quickly realised that our previously decided-upon location of the Canary Wharf DLR was simply not going to work. We were told that we couldn't shoot on there for security reasons by an official and all the carriages were filled with people despite it being late on a Sunday. Thus, we decided to take another recce the next week in which we would decide how to change our location whilst keeping our plot and visual style. On this recce, we decided to film around the London Bridge area as it allowed us to keep our urban style whilst not particularly affecting the story. As abandoning the train journey took away some of the opening's mood of progression and motion, we added in some walking through what we hoped were interesting, fairly dramatic locations.


Our recce




Having changed our location, we were now filming completely in the open air rather than enclosed in a train carriage for most of the opening. Thus it became a lot more important to operate the audio recording equipment proficiently as there is a great deal of atmospheric sound from other people and wind on London Bridge. Through this we learnt a lot about how to optimise sound with the equipment and I felt much more at ease with the equipment by the end of it.


Many people were walking up and down London Bridge and it was extremely windy




Of course, the technical side does not end there, as we then moved into the editing suite where I was, at first, baffled by the software and the plethora of functions and effects. However throughout the process of editing our film, I got more and more to grips with the software and actually found it to be incredibly intuitive. By the end of our editing, I felt I had a very comprehensive knowledge of how to edit a film and how to add effects, titles and perform various other tasks on Final Cut Pro X.


Layout of Final Cut Pro X




In conclusion, I feel I have learnt most about the importance of preparation when it comes to film making as thinks such as storyboarding and performing recces proved to be incredibly useful when you are taking on a relatively large project.

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