Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
By LiamMcmillen
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Researching Thriller
During the early months of the course, we researched into the Thriller genre looking at mise-en-scene, editing and the history of the genre. This helped us gain a knowledge of the Thriller genre and it helped us find out how directors go about making Thriller films. This was good for us because we were going to need to make an opening title sequence for a Thriller film. This research helped our opening title sequence be as good as it could be. -
Moving into our Preliminary Exercise groups
Shortly after researching Thriller we moved into our preliminary exercise groups. This was strange, because we didn't really know each other. It was also strange because many of us weren't great with using the cameras and we had to be taught as we went along. This helped us learn how to use them though and prepared us for our opening title sequence. -
Planning our Preliminary Exercise
For our preliminary exercise, we had to delegate tasks out due to our individual skills set. Jamie became the cameraman because he was the only person in our group to have experience using the camera, whereas I was the director and Ryan was the actor. We felt that would work well because Ryan was a good actor. To plan for our preliminary exercise, we needed to storyboard what we were going to do on the day we filmed. This helped the filming flow more effectively. -
Filming and editing our preliminary exercise
Our Preliminary ExerciseAs we were fairly new to filming, we had to learn the rules. We had to make sure that our film had continuity and that we stuck to the 180 degree rule. We also used many shots and tricks that we learnt from our research. This prelimiary exercise worked well. The only problems we had was the fact that our room that we were meant to film in changed, so we had to change a couple of our shots around. Overall, I learnt how the cameras work and how to work in a group which helped for our final piece. -
Preliminary Exercise: How it went
I thought our preliminary exercise went well, especially as we were all rookies with filming. I was proud of how we did. -
Formed Groups for our opening title sequence
Our preliminary exercise helped us learn how to film and use the cameras, so we then were put into our final groups for our Thriller opening title sequence. Our group, however, didn't change and we had the same group that we did for the preliminary exercise. Due to the fact that we were used to Thriller films now, when going about making our opening title sequence, we thought about what mise-en-scene we were going to use and what shots we should use for it. -
Planning Our Opening Title Sequence
As a group, we had a group session talking about ideas that we had for a Thriller opening title sequence to make. We came up with our final idea and then we had to plan out what we were going to do with storyboards, scripts and props lists. This helped organise us for the filming day. Our main aim was to add as much variety to shots as possible. -
Final Idea for Opening Title Sequence
Now that we had the foundation of our idea we started developing a starting opening sequence for our film, jotting our ideas down, writing up specifics like locations, props and characters and then over the next few week built up a storyboard showing roughly our sequence. -
Filming Day
At first, things weren't going our way. It was a cold day and it had started to snow -which could have mucked up the continuity. Luckily for us, it stopped snowing and once we got into the flow of filming we did well and I'd say that the day was successful. -
Filming Day
We managed to get all the shots we needed and we improvised a little and got some cool shots for us to use. We filmed at two locations, which took up a chunk of our filming time, but we managed to finish in time and we felt satisfied with what we did. -
Editing
Next lesson we started to edit our piece. As Jamie was the more confident on macs and with edited, he was the main editor while me and Ryan chipped in ideas. -
Editing
The editing stage was vital for our opening title sequence because we relied heavily on using graphics to develop our character. We also changed the shot colours, (marking them darker/putting flashbacks in black and white) we used effects such as cross disolves, and dips to white. Mainly to link together shots creating an intense flashing motion to build suspense, or using the cross disolve to show mirrored match on action. We really had a mess around with these effects making them look as e -
Reshoot
We wanted to make a new graphic, so we decided to do another shoot so we could add more to our character. -
FINAL PRODUCT
Our final cut turned out looking okay. Everything tied in together in the end. It seemed to look okay to others as well, and it fitted into the Thriller genre well which is what the original aim was. -
What would we change next time?
If I would change anything, I would make our opening title sequence more narrative based because I felt that our opening title sequence was quite loose. -
What do I take from the course?
Overall after this module I have learnt a lot more about the filming process and all the planning and work involved and all the obstacles that can knock you off task. It really is important to keep on top of the planning in order to be ready for the filming.
