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

Our preliminary task I believe plays a big part in the actual final product. We did not try hard when it came to the preliminary task, in fact we actually completed this task within a few hours of our teacher telling us to make one. My group and I did not even make a story board before shooting the preliminary as this was not taken as serious  unlike the final product, we ended up making the storyboard after we had done the preliminary task. We also had to us our Blackberry phones to video the scenes, so we believed this was not serious, however we had a different approach when doing the actual filming.

Now doing the actual filming we believed that we had to actually come with a good storyline and storyboard, reason being that it would set guidelines allowing us as a group to avoid and overcome any barriers, this was achieved as the storyboard had everything we needed to add and it could have easily been changed if needs be. Using the techniques from the preliminary task such as being able to preform the 180 degree rule and the others, Match on Attack and of course Shot -Reverse Shot we were able to make some of the frames of the final piece look really good because we were now paying attention to the lighting and other things audience would notice. Which brings me to the improvements we made when shooting the actually opening scene, we began to think about the location, costumes and the props. This was not concentrated on when doing the preliminary, whereas we had to concentrate on these things so the audience are able to portray things and have a good understanding of where we as a group were coming from when filming. Unlike the preliminary task we had to now focus on where the scenes would be located, we had to focus on this because it allows the audience to see some realism and actually believe that the genre of the film must be a thriller. 

I believe I learnt a lot from doing the preliminary task first because it made me see that a lot of planning and research needs to go into filming how ever small the piece may be. The planning and research as you see through out this blog was immense and this was only for 3 minutes of filming which makes you think that a lot needs to go into these films for people to publish a really great product. I also conclude that our group could have been more organised and aware of the amount of work we would have had to put out, but overall there has been more positives then negatives. What we could improve on next time is definitely time management and selecting rolls for people, these two issues could have affected us as a group really bad as an individual was not pulling his weight and we believed they should be giving this course their all because we were doing the same and this course work was all about teamwork. One thing I believed I achieved throughout this course was being able to concur the software programmes on the iMac, I have learnt a lot in regards to editing films it was not as easy as I thought it would be but helping one another (teamwork) allowed me to feel comfortable when doing editing. The name Alfred Hitchcock Junior says it all when it comes to my camera skills and being able to pick locations, this was definitely the most successful part of the filming and that is what I believe as an individual. 

Finally the overall finished product to me is very good, the reason why I do not believe it is excellent is because I feel that we have not captured every aspect of the thriller genre itself, we may have made the final product have some scenes of suspense but we have not managed to make the audience jump. On the plus side the feed back we have received happens to be really good, most people we have shown have left wanting more, which I believe is a really good thing as we have made them feel part of the film.