Looking Back at Preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to full product?

In the preliminary task I felt we used very basic camera shots, we tried to be adventurous with a pan shot. But after shooting and editing our finished product, we used a scissor lift shot, a tracking shot, several pans and many shots that were significantly out of our comfort zone at the time of shooting the preliminary task. The editing process for doing our preliminary task was very simple and short. We literally put a shot first, and then we cut it directly into another shot. We didn’t even use titles. But we did have to dub over our final cut, because no sound was recorded on the day, due to no fault of ours, which was more advanced than all the other groups. In our finished product, we used animated titles, fades and various sound effects as well as the sound we recorded on the day. Also the storyline was much more developed, and we put a lot more thought into our choice of actor, as opposed to the preliminary task where we literally just found someone who was free at the time.

Unlike our preliminary task, we spent weeks planning our thrillers, largely because the more preparation we did, the smoother the shoot day would run and as a result, the better the overall product would look. There were so many aspects of pre-production; we had equipment lists, cast lists, props list, set designs, extras designs, storyboards, costume lists, and information on the setting of our thriller and of course lighting requirements (i.e. whether it was night or day and how we would replicate these effects in the studio).

In comparison, the preliminary task’s editing process was much simpler and less time consuming than the main task, but we gained a much greater knowledge of final cut pro through the editing of our main tasks as a result of this. In the preliminary task we used titles and sound to help sell our finished products, we had to change this frequently to accompany the mood of the thriller, and also because we hadn’t used titles on our preliminary tasks, so the whole concept was a bit new to us.

The use of sound developed hugely, we didn’t add any sound FX to the preliminary task, we only re-recorded the dialogue due to a faulty microphone, in our thriller, we kept our sounds because our microphone wasn’t faulty, but we also added and changed sounds using soundtrack pro. I made a soundtrack for our thriller out of various drones, and sound effects, we doubled up on many sounds also just to thicken them out and make them wholly more realistic. The overall result of my soundtrack was a tense and suspense building atmosphere.

As a result of recruiting a better actor, the suspense in our thriller was much better, and comparing this to our preliminary task, where our actors where really quite bad, it really makes a huge difference even in a thriller like ours where there is no dialogue, because there is no one to talk to.