Evaluation question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in...

1. Editing

1.1. When we edited the preliminary task we were not very confident in our editing skills and thus some parts of the film were slightly out of sync such as movements and sound or our shots lasted to long. We also found that some of our other techniques such as a match on action were slightly out of sync.

1.2. As we came to editing our final thriller we developed our skills to add sound effects and gun flashes in sync with the action on the screen. We also learnt to use fades on both our audio and our video clips to smoothly transition between them. We were also taught to add titles that change over the action for our opening.

1.3. Overall as we have transitioned from preliminary task to final cut we have greatly improved our editing skills and are far better at transitioning between scenes and making all of our assets synchronised.

2. Ideas

2.1. Our preliminary task was based off of a single idea which we kept identical throughout filming. We kept our idea basic with no expansive plot in mind or any idea of the context behind the film.

2.2. For our final thriller we created three different ideas and then developed our favourite one, creating our characters and our rough plot ideas. We changed this idea to as our film developed to make it less difficult to understand and more effective at invoking a reaction in the audience.

2.3. Overall our final idea was far more developed than that of our preliminary task making filming and editing it far less difficult as we knew what our plot should be from the beginning.

3. Planning

3.1. We barely planned our preliminary task. After developing a basic idea, we created a rough storyboard and then went straight to filming. We did not design costumes or plan a script and this negatively effected our films effectiveness.

3.2. Whilst planning our final thriller we extensively planned our characters, for example designing their costumes, make up and props as well as designing scripts for what needed to be said. One member of our group planned and composed a piece of music to play over our film in the background. We also planned a shooting schedule which helped us to know when and were we were supposed to film.

3.3. Overall our final thriller benefited from extensive planning as we knew what we should be doing and when making our filming far easier to do as we were not having to make up our plot or our costumes/props as we went along.

4. Filming

4.1. When we started our preliminary task our filming work and cinematography skills were not particularly good. We broke the 180 degree rule at one point and at certain points during recording we had to take several shots as many of them were unsteady or shot from bad angles.

4.2. Whilst filming our final thriller we noticed that we were far more efficient and effective at choosing and shooting each of our shots as they were consistently stable and we didn't ever break the 180 degree rule like we did before. We also used several different shot types (such as POV.)

4.3. Overall during the transition between preliminary task and our final thriller we quickly developed our cinematography skills to allow us to effectively film our thriller opening so that it is of good quality when it is first screened.