Task 7: What We Have Learned From Prelim To Main Task

Task 7

What We Have Learned From Prelim To Main Task

From the initial prelim task to the making of our thriller, I think it is safe to say that I've come quite a long way in terms of my knowledge in how to make a low/no budget film. We've looked at how the cameras work, various filming techniques including shot types and camera angles and editing, including sound and after effects. 



The camera work in our preliminary task is fairly basic, with six still camera shots, two of which are the same, just zoomed in a bit. I would say that the camera work in our thriller is far more effective than what we had in our prelim, as we had more professional and creative camera angles, as well as a much wider range of shot types. Another thing we introduced to our thriller was a mixture of stationary and moving shots. We used a lot of hand held shots in order to make our thriller seem more realistic and almost filmed documentuary style, as well as pans and long shots to create perspective, essential to the sniper scene. The range and diversity of our camera shots made our thriller appear much more professional in comparison to the fairly limited preliminary task.

In our preliminary task, the mis-en-scene was very basic, a bare room with one of our actors standing in it. There is an exchange involving, I believe, a can of hairspray. The M.E.S. in our prelim tells the audience nothing, as it is very non-specific and doesn't really make a lot of sense. In our thriller however, the mis-en-scene is more specific and obvious to the audience. It is set outside a large country estate looking house and most of the action takes place in and around a car that is flagged down by a supposed police officer. There are more actors, six rather than two, and of differing ages actually relevent to the storyline. The use of props and costume also added to our mie-en-scene, in the prelim the actors wore whatever the happened to be wearing that day, but in our thriller we had two police uniforms complete with weapons and a radio for the officers and the other actors dressed as the family the thriller is based around would.

There were no sound effects in our preliminary task, there was only the dialogue between Charlie and Joe and the sound of the can hitting the ground. No sounds were added in during the editing process. For our Thriller we had quite a few sound effects that we added in during editing, including but not limited to; gunshots, impacts and whistles. We used soundtrack pro to find and modify the sounds that we needed. Often the sounds were too long, meaning we had to cut them to the length of the window in which they were needed. For example, the sniper shot was originally two rounds of cannon fire but it had the desired effect so I cut off the majority of the clip, measuring against the amount of time it was needed for in our thriller and then inserted it into final cut pro and synchronised it with the visual effects that make the shooting.

The editing process was extremely basic for our preliminary task, although this is where we learned how to make log and rush bins on Final Cut pro and order and sequence our shots. We did not add any sound or visual effects in Final Cut, we only cut our shots together. For our main thriller, we did the same as before, ordered our shots and cut them together, then used After Effects to create the scope and the blood. The scope and the optics change involved creating masks in After Effects in order to get the black around scope area, the changeover and the blurred focus on the edges of the sight. The blood was done by using a two separate sample animated blood spatters, altering the sise and throw and then centering them in on the crosshair and synchronising with the scope movement when the gun fires.

I feel that our group has come a long way since the prelim task through to the main editing process, we have not only learned how to use various computer programs such as Final Cut pro, Soundtrack Pro and Adobe After Effects, but learned how to utilise them in order to make a convincingly professional looking thriller.