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

In our preliminary task we were unprepared. We didn't plan everything and a lot of the things we did weren't in accordance to the proper thriller genre. We though if we got some good camera angles and we did something spooky, that our preliminary task would fit the thriller genre - we were wrong.

We hadn't done any research on our prelim task and so we didn't know so much about how the conventions of thrillers worked and how important they were to making a successful opening. We didn't take into account the various elements needed at first. We had also just got started with all the equipment and applications on the prliminary task, we didn't know too much about them and couldn't use them to maximum efficiency.

We began the creation of our opening sequence much differently than we had for our preliminary task. We didn't just make an idea on the spot, we had many different ideas on what we wanted to do and how we were going to them, if we could add things from all our ideas and put it into one finished product. We also did our research into the thriller openings and movies and how the openings of thrillers lead to the movie and the story it portrayed. We even used openings from television shows to broaden our perspective. This allowed us to get a better idea of how thriller movies work and correspond with the audience, something we did not do in our preliminary. Using real life products as inspiration (movies such as American Psycho) helped immensely.

We were also a lot more comfortable in the use of equipment. We were more used to using the camera and applications which allowed us to shoot our scenes with a variety of different camera shots and angles suited to our genre and story.

We learned a variety of different camera angles and shots and used them better than we had in the preliminary task;

Medium close-up shot of the victims upper body

Close-up of character's feet as he walks alongs

                                                                                        
These are screengrabs of shots we used in our thriller sequence. We used some of them in our preliminary task although with not as much efficiency. In our preliminary task we were to absorbed in the idea of using many differeny kinds of shots at once (even though there wasn't much going on) and making them as 'extravagent' as possible.

A high angle shot we used in one of our scenes

Although there are still things that could have improved. The soundtrack for one didn't exactly fit the purpose 100%. Unfortunately our original music editor/creator was not present and could  not create the music so we had to improvise. We could have also improved on our setting/location, there were many places we could have explored although alas it was not meant to be.