Evalution:

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

I believe that I have developed as a film maker very well due to the team I’ve been filming with. I know I’ve grown as a film maker in the editing side because on day one I didn’t have a clue how to use IMovie but now I know how to work it and use effects effectively this is due to the team I’ve been working with because watching them enabled me to get a good understand of how it worked and then developing my skills on my own by trying out new skills and investigating how it works and now helping my mates on IMovie just shows me how much I’ve progressed from the preliminary and how much I’ve developed as a film maker.

My strengthens in film making would be the editing part. I believe I have picked up this strength via my work partners who are very good at the technology side of film making. Although this is my strength there is still a lot of room for improvement but before the prelim I didn’t know a single thing about editing therefore I believe I’ve improved massively. Also I believe my main strength which I brought to this team was the planning and organisation when organising what everyone’s role was I stepped forward and navigated that and also it was important I kept my blog nice and organized which I think I did at a good standard.

 

 

Some of the specific skills I have developed were skills such continuity which is a style of editing that requires the director to try to make the film reality as much like the audience's reality as possible. This means the film is trying to recreate what the world around us is and trying to make it easier on the audience to comprehend and understand the action happening on screen. Within this style of editing there are many terms or ways of implementing the style. These affects can be used independently of each other to create desired affects. Also 180 degree rule was key when filming for us because if we didn’t get this right it would just confuse the audience.

 

 

The 180 degree rule is basically The 180-degree rule of shooting and editing keeps the camera on one side of the action. As a matter of convention, the camera stays on one side of the axis of action throughout a scene; this keeps characters grounded compositionally on a particular side of the screen or frame, and keeps them looking at one another when only one character is seen onscreen at a time. The technique allows for an expansion of the frame into the unseen space off-screen. It is referred to as a rule because the camera, when shooting two actors, must not cross over the axis of action; if it does, it risks giving the impression that the actors' positions in the scene have been reversed. Also shot reverse-shot is continuity editing technique used in conversations or simply characters looking at each other or objects. A shot showing what the character is supposedly looking at (either a point of view or over the shoulder shot) is followed by a reverse angle shot of the character themselves looking at it, or of the other character looking back at them, for example. Shot reverse shot often ties in with the 180° rule to retain continuity by not distorting the audience’s sense of location of the characters in the shots. The last editing technique is match on action this was also key. Match on action is basically is an editing technique for continuity editing in which one shot cuts to another shot portraying the action of the subject in the first shot. This creates the impression of a sense of continuity the action carrying through creates a “visual bridge” which draws the viewer’s attention away from slight cutting or continuity issues. This is not a graphic match or match cut; it portrays a continuous sense of the same action rather than matching two separate things.

The way we approached filming our opening titles was we had a planning page on our blogger. This is where we put all our work up and it meant that when it came to filming we had a clear idea on what we needed to do.  The main bit of planning that we needed to carry out that would help our production was the shot list. This was important because it meant we was prepared for what we needed to shot when we was out filming.

I beileve now looking back at our thriller we can improve on such things as finding a better location which fitted our genre so that we didn’t have to relie on the edititng so much. Because all we had to work with was a not in use bridge and some woods I beileve that this opening title was a success. Another area of improvement was the timing I beileve we could of improved how quickly we did the editing. The strength of our opening title I beileve was the sound and the editing it really created the effect we was looking for and applied to a mass audience.

The way in which we created and developed our skills from the prelim to the actaul thriller is massive you can tell we have come a long way from the screenshots below and how we have developed our skills as time has gone by.

 

Prelim                                                               Actual

 
 

The first screenshot is of the titles. We believed that the titles would look a lot more effective at the end of the opening titles so we put them at the end. The reasoning behind this is because in our prelim we didn’t think that the titles stood out at the start of the opening scene and when researching other film openings they had their titles at the end of the opening.

 
 

These screenshots show you the types of shots we used. In the prelim we decided to act like someone was watching them from CCTV because at the time we thought it was an effect way to keep the audience on the edge of their seats but then we decided that if we could see it from their eyes then it’ll look more effect so we decided to use point of view shots. The difference in these shots also is the quality. When filming our prelim on one of the schools camera we decided it was great quality and to make our filming a lot of eye catching we opted for using one of our own cameras.

 

These two shots have the same description it is them both running away the only difference is that the editing is a lot better and the positioning of the shots. In the prelim shot the only thing going on in that shot is the person running away but on the other hand in the actual thriller opening we have 3 things going on in a 4 second shot this is important because it tells the viewer that the movie is going to be action packed and thrilling. 

To conclude these opening titles I believe it went better than I thought it would because once we finished the filming I thought the shots that we got weren’t great and I didn’t think we fitted the genre well enough. Also I didn’t think we had enough shots because we planned on doing quick editing so we would need a lot of shots. But the editing was done exceptionally well to bring back what I thought would be a D/C grade to potential A/B. so overall I believe our opening thriller was a success.