Evaluation 7

Our preliminary task was a first attempt at getting to know how to use a camera, coupled with the techniques we have learned to make the film seem more effective. Since we have never really done something like this before, it was a good learning curve to get us to understand and to help get a feel for what we would be working with for our final thriller production. Our editing in our preliminary was very much basic cuts, there were a few motivated cuts. We struggled for space when making our preliminary and as a result the 180 degree rule was broken, so it looked very ineffective. Fortunately these downsides of our preliminary definitely made us think about how we were going to improve our final product and we are proud that we overcame the difficulties we had last time. The ending of our preliminary was also rushed and the dialogue used was very loose, this made it all seem very unprofessional and rushed. Although we feel our preliminary isn't very impressive at all we still feel it was a very good experience since we learned so much just from the short time that we spent doing it, it allowed us to learn new techniques with editing and camerawork, it gave us an opportunity to see what worked and what didn't.

We feel like we've progressed immensely since our preliminary. Since we now had the freedom to make a short opening to a film of our own design, it gave us a lot more space to work with and a lot more ideas that we could try and make look effective. Our initial storyboard shows that we intended to have a lot more of an extravagant plot, with a victim being thrown into a makeshift grave by one or more antagonists, we also planned to use a shot where we would place the camera into the grave (a POV of the victim) and to shovel the dirt back into the grave (and on to the camera). However due to the lack of space we could work with as well as there only just being two of us it was soon found out that this would be very difficult to do. Therefore we aimed for it to be simple yet effective with hardly any acting in it at all, most of it would be composed of the car driving and some shots of random objects that will make the place seem very eerie.

What we think went well - We thought we managed to get some good and effective shots in our film opening such as the POV shot and long shots. We also feel that we utilised the editing very well, as we were able to do things such as saturate out some of the colour so it looks a lot more dull. Parts of our opening were inspired to that of TV show The Walking Dead, where parts of random objects that had little to nothing to do with the actual film were put in to emphasise how isolated and abandoned the setting we used was. We aimed to have our titles presented as quite eerie and much like any other horror thriller title credits opening, we believed we have succeeded in this aspect especially with the use of the font. We also feel the setting we used was very effective, we managed to make it seem isolated and quite a creepy location.

What we could have improved - Although we though our filming location was very good for our opening, it was sometimes difficult to make an effective shot with much of the ground being uneven. We had to scrap a few ideas of shots because of the factor that filming it with the tripod was difficult as it was a challenge to get the camera perfectly straight. Although we couldn't effectively execute what was on our storyboard in the first place, we still managed to change it around to make it much easier to do. We also filmed among two days this proved to be an issue due to the fact that the sun was brighter on the second day, this meant that the camera was picking up more light which made the shots much brighter in tone. This meant that Will and I had to select the clips that were similar in tones and also the clips which we needed to include had to be changed in tone if they were different.