Question 7

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

Since my preliminary task, I have certainly developed new media skills, including the ability to demonstrate more advanced filming and editing skills, as well as analysing them afterwards at a higher level. After watching the final product of my preliminary video, I found major errors and flaws came to light that I was unable to spot and rectify during the creation process. I had broken the 180 degree rule twice, being unable to establish which side of the room my two characters were on, confusing the audience watching somewhat. 

Also, I had a very limited range of shots simply because I had little understanding of the different type of shots at this point. My continuity wasn’t great, and there was a significant flaw in my attention to detail for each individual shot and how they worked with the shots immediately before and after. An example being a side on shot of me opening the door, which was followed by a separate shot from a different angle of me opening the door again, which disrupted the flow and stood out as a major editing error. 

Due to having limited knowledge of editing softwares such as Sony Vegas at the time, I had little ability to change the sound. This meant I had a poor balance between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, with my instrumental soundtrack drowning out the brief diegetic voice passages in my actual video. I had no titles in my preliminary, which is something I learned provides a professional seeming appeal to openings when these were included in the final production. There was an example of shot reverse-shot and match on action in my preliminary, however they didn’t work at all fluidly, and due to my limited time I had to film, they could not be reshot. This wasn’t a problem for the final thriller, which we had a number of hours to complete, meaning mistakes could either be re-filmed or edited out afterwards. I hadn’t created a significantly detailed storyboard or shotlist for my preliminary video, meaning that I struggled deciding which shots to create during the filming process. For our final project, we had a clear storyboard and a detailed shotlist which we constantly referred to when filming. An obvious factor that proved detrimental to the success and quality of my preliminary was the filming itself. I used an iPad and had the video filmed only by hand. This meant that the footage wasn’t entirely clear, and was also quite shaky, which didn’t help the overall success of my video. For our actual thriller, we used much higher quality cameras (DSLR) and had tripods, which provided us with a much higher quality of footage. These cameras also held far more data and could store a lot more footage than my iPad, meaning we were able to film many repeats of the same shot to find the best one to use in our final production.

In terms of the success of our overall final production, I think it is clear that our various newly acquired media skills were demonstrated sufficiently. We had a varied range of shot types, and made sure not to break any continuity rules or the 180 rule. Our soundtrack was altered and edited a number of times in order to make it fit as well as to the overall product as possible. Having spent a lot of time understand the conventions of thrillers, especially mystery and psychological thrillers, we had a greater understand of who the target audience and demographics were for our type of thriller we were creating, meaning that we could focus on filming shots and editing techniques we knew would appeal to those who enjoy watching our chosen genre. Beforehand, for my preliminary, my thriller genre was very broad and wasn’t narrowed down, so I couldn’t study a particular genre very well, and I struggled on focusing on one type of thriller when trying to find out which shot types and editing techniques will most appeal to those watching my thriller.