What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

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.

Recorded Sound

On the day, we recorded several items of sound-only takes. The first was the table falling over, as the sound will be inserted when rory is stumbling around in the dark, the second was all sorts of things hitting the floor, including nails, a glass smashing and a torch hitting the floor, the torch which later illuminates dead bodies. I think this will build suspense on the final product and will introduce more depth to our project.

Account of Shoot Day

Our shoot day began at nine and finished seven hours later. I was pleased with our set on the day because it was identical to the our set design and storyboards. In this time we shot roughly a half hours worth of film, all of which will be divided down into five minutes worth of footage, which will hopefully be horrifying.

I think that overall, the day went well, our main actor, Rory, whom we chose to appeal to a niche audience of teenagers, was fantastic and made our lives very easy, the make up was superb on the day and was hugely life-like, but I think we could have controlled our dead bodies a little bit better because there were time when a lot of them were talking and it used up time we could have used to film little bits and bobs that would have made the finished product better. We worked surprisingly well as a team, Tom was a nice dictator of a director, Tamara was the producer who was constantly running around fixing things and making sure people knew where they needed to be, Alex did the lighting and the boom mike and I filmed the whole ordeal. It could have been worse.

The Reason we chose Rory was quite specific, our film is largely very similar to the saw films and the hostel films, our features a formulaic story line and isn't particularly dependant on development of character. One of the big reasons we chose to use Rory is that he does Drama and we all already knew that he was a phenomal actor, another big factor is that he could grow a convincing beard, we needed this to make it look like he had been in the same place for a while.

In terms of technicality, we used a Sony PD170 to film our production and we used one redhead lighting device strategically placed behind our window as to manipulate the affect that sunlight was coming through the cracks. We used the Genie scissor lift at one point to film a high sequence, and we used tracks to film Rory falling through a door. We used a Sennheiser microphone on a boom stand to record all of the sound, we may not use some of this sound as it sounds tinny.

There were times when Tom was trying to be a little too optimistic and there was a tracking section of filming which I didn't get quite right. But these were all tiny details that will not affect the overall product. Our roles within the group stayed as we had planned them to throughout, if any thing had changed it would be Alex who did the sound as well as the lights, but this wasn't difficult because there was barely any lighting and hardly any sound besides the FX we recorded and the screaming bits.

I was Head of Photography, Tom was Director and Tamara was producer. If i could change anything now i would change the shots of the bodies, where there were flashes of light, because i don't think that this is particularly justified as the audience wont have a clue as to where the light came from. Our shots we chose to take are almost identical to the storyboard. We didn't need to scout locations as we only shot in the studio. Our film differs from the preliminary task because we only shot about four shots in the preliminary task, whilst in our thriller we shot a whole range of shots. Also we recorded sound for our preliminary task, but we did this only with voices in a studio, but in our thriller we recorded footsteps, breaking glass, nails hitting the floor and a torch rolling around. Our story was also much more developed, but that was to be expected.

But what's done is done, and I am ecstatic as to what we got, and I am eagerly anticipating the editing process.

The Effectiveness of Pre-Production

Overall, I think our group was one the best organised, if not, THE best organised as we had a solid story throughout the planning process, other groups had to change their idea quite late in the process, this will have an effect on their finished product as the story wont be as strong as first predicted. We have been ready way ahead of time, we finished our treatment whilst the others were still finalising their ideas. But i do think we could have made our shooting schedule a little stronger and we could have organised the props so we had them well in advance. This experience has taught me that in film making, you need to be ready really early. Because if you're not ready, you wont have time to fix all the little things that go wrong, and there will be things that go wrong. We got off lightly, things break, batteries run out, you can't account for everything, but you can leave yourself time and space to fix these things. But at the end of the day, all the little things add up to a big thing, and when big things go wrong they are much much harder to fix.

Shooting Schedule

Our shooting schedule was a relatively simple one. Firstly we shot film to get sound effects for whats going on the in the darkness whilst we are filming. Then we shot all the basic filler shots with all the dead bodies, including their close ups, first so that they could get on and go back to school, we then used the rest of the afternoon to film establishing shots and all the closeups of the protagonist. We then moved on to filming wide shots of the set, closeups of the light bulb and more sound effects. It didn't differ from our schedule, other than we broke for lunch a little later than scheduled.

Costumes and Props

We sourced all our props locally. We got all the materials for our set from the theatre department, we also got the torch from the theatre department. Besides this we bought all the fake blood, and the liquid latex which we used to make people up to look dead. Overall, the make up, which was done by Alex's mum and sister, was massively convinces on camera once we had applied the light. Everyone looked so pale, almost like they were on the verge of death. We got a load of paint and mixed it up to look like blood, because when we had got there, all we had on the walls was brown smears. So Alex and I mixed up all the paint and flicked onto the walls to make it look like a lot of blood splatter. I thought the paint on the door was the most convincing.

Everyone was dressed in everyday clothes, except one girl, who our director and producer wanted to make look like a prostitute, so they put her in a corset and stilettos. I felt this was wholly unnecessary as this girl is on camera for about a second and we only see her face.