EVALUATION Q7: Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full project?

During the prelim our task was to film “a character opening a door, who walks into a room and sits down next to another character and they share a few lines of dialogue”. The brief mentioned that we had to have at least one match cut, an example of a shot reverse shot and show our understanding of the 180 degree rule.  In comparison to our final thriller, we had to treat our prelim as a mini version of what was to come for our real title opening, so in terms of this we had to go through pre- production, production and post- production.  During pre- production our group had outlined some ideas of what we could do in our thriller, by doing so an animatic storyboard was produced which would identify the sequence of the shots and what type of camera angle it would be.  Due to the idea of our final thriller being based around Korean ghost stories, our group followed the theme by seeing how it would play out in our prelim that way we could get a taste for how our final thriller would be. Our group’s final prelim idea was that we would have a normal friendly girl (character 1) playing in a park and sitting on a swing, when another mysterious girl (character 2) shows up and takes the swing besides her, character 1 being a friendly person hasn’t seen character 2 before and so asks what her name is, character 2 replies by glaring at character 1 and before we know it character 2 has mysteriously disappeared, leaving character 1 in shock.

During production, my role was to be an actor so I had to play the friendly girl. Our group found that my character had to always be in the background; otherwise the sequence of our prelim wouldn’t match up. Due to the limited amount of time we had to find a set which was close by to film, so we chose Myddelton Square Gardens, what I particularly liked about our location was that there was a church right beside it which gave our prelim an eerie atmosphere.  I took some screen grabs of some important shots from our prelim, you can see that we have used a close up of character 2 opening the gate which was part of our brief, we have been told that shots of shoes are excellent and I think it’s great we used it in our prelim. Next, you will see a shot of character 1 and 2 talking both of these shots were done in a short reverse shot. Finally, character 1 looks around suspiciously wondering where character 2 has gone.

During the editing, sound and effects were added to our prelim. I like that one minute we can see character 2 walking and the next she disappears, it shows that she is a ghost and the dark sound adds to this. Overall, we have established the 180 degree rule where character 1 is always on the left of the screen while character 2 the right side of the screen. I believe that the prelim task did help when it came to making our final thriller, as we were gaining experience on how to use software’s such as Final Cut Pro and Sound Track Pro.