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

PRELIMINARY

PRELIMINARY TASK

We shot our preliminary task at the beginning of the school year with very little knowledge and experience. I had never used a

DSLR camera before or Premiere. Some people in my group had studied media at GCSE so I learnt through them and also just

practicing.

WHAT I’VE LEARNT?

CINEMATOGRAPHY

• I learnt the importance of cinematography and how different shot distances and angles can make a scene more interesting and also more dramatic.

• In the Preliminary task I knew this and tried to use a range of different shots and angles but they didn’t all fit with what was happening at that point. Taking this into account in our final construction piece I made sure that the camera angles and shots that we used were appropriate to what was happening which made the final piece look a lot more effective.

SHOTS FROM PRELIMINARY

SHOTS FROM FINAL PIECE

• As you will be able to see from the shots in the two slides a lot of the shots we used in the preliminary task were close ups or medium shots which were simple and didn’t hold the audiences attention.

• However taking this into account when filming the final piece you can see the shots used are a lot more varied and we also used angles. For example the top right shot is a high angle long shot.

MISE-EN-SCENE• I also learnt the importance on mise-en-scene and how important it is to make sure that

everything that is in frame during a shot has a reason to be in it.

• For example, in some shots from the preliminary task we didn’t think about it and some things in the frame aren’t relevant. This can be seen below where there is a black bin in the back of the shot.

• We did make this mistake again, in one shot my cat was in the background which was distracting to the audience and took their attention away from the conversation that the two people in the scene we’re having, so we didn’t use this shot in our final piece.

EDITING• I learnt how to use Premiere and all the devices in it to edit the sequence and create

titles.

• I learnt that titles have a huge impact on the effect the title sequence leaves on the audience. This is why we went back and changed our titles font and movement and position so many times so that they looked the best they could and really had an effect on the audience. We put a lot of effort into the titles because after looking into the title sequences like Se7en and seeing the titles in that it really set a standard to what we wanted to achieve.

• We didn’t even use titles in our Preliminary as they were something that we didn’t know how to do . All we did was put a very basic ineffective one at the beginning.

• As you can see from the two shots below we also used effects and changed the colours of shots and were overall a lot more creative with the editing in our final piece.

SOUND

• Something that we didn’t effectively use in our preliminary task was sound and after research into the horror genre that is one of the key conventions of horror.

• We used music in our final piece at the right times to engage the audience and help build suspense. We also used a mixture of diegetic and non diegetic sound which my group in the preliminary task didn’t do, mainly because we didn't’t know how to.

HOW I’VE DEVELOPED• I think that my camera skills have developed the most out of everything as at the

beginning they were poor and shaky compared to the actual filming where everyone trusted me to film most of the shots. To begin with I got confused about the 180 degree rule and would often break it making editing hard or in some cases the whole group would have to go and re film. I soon understood this and remembered it every time we filmed and often found myself reminding others of it. This meant that the continuity of the sequence wasn’t broken and it improved the quality of our piece.

• I also feel that my editing skills have developed since the first time I edited using premiere. Below you can see the difference in detail there is editing compared to before and what there is now.