Looking back at our preliminary task, I can notice a distinct change in sophistication and execution of then and at to how our final thriller turned out. Without a doubt it has been a very fulfilling experience and one that hasn’t come all at once. We have had to have a lot of patients in learning how to do camera work, different type of shots, editing and learning how to use after effects.
The planning and preparation for our prelim task compared to the planning and preparation of our main task was hugely different. Obviously we weren't given as much direction with our main task as we had with our preliminary task, where we were given a basic storyboard a script and a lot of direction. As a result planning our prelim task only took one lesson, to decide upon the type of shots, and angles we would use. We simply took the basic script and decided on shoot day what we would base our script around—in our case we based it around a rubix cube. However, when planning our main task, we took at least two weeks, planning and preparing a range of different ideas and coming up with different styles of shots, comparing what would look the most effective and transfereing all our ideas onto a storyboard and powerpoints, keeping track of the development process.
When shooting our preliminary task we used more basic camera shots, like point of view shots and over the shoulder shots. However, as we had become more advanced through intensive research and planning we were able to develop our style and use tracking shots, which took a lot more time and accuracy to create and make good.
In regard to shooting location, we were able to be in contorl, deciding upon where would be the most effective place to shoot, making our film look consistant. Whereas, in our prelim task, we were given a location and told to make what we could out of it. By having this sort of control over our main task, we were able to create the image of what we actually wanted. This was also contributed in the mise en scene of the piece, we were able to desing our set, making it a more realistic setting compared to the media suite.
Throughout the filming of the prelim task and the main task we learnt different things. Obviously we were able to use much better equiptment when shooting our main task, and we used much more advanced things, allowing us to extend our knowledge of using the camera, which wasn't accessable to us when filming our preilm task.
When making our prelim task, it was quite straingforward, iin the aspect that the sound and film was craeted all from the same place. As our main task was thematic, and didn't include people, we had to record our voice over and then transfer it into the sequence, then instering music of top of that. Here we encountered a problem as none of us had actually any experience in doing this. However, we quickly found out that it was quite straight forward and was simple a question of repeating what we had done with our film shots, removing background sounds, but instead, using the sound and removing the image that was connected to it.
It is very clear from watching our piece that we have been hugely dependant of after effect, which also at first glance seemed to be a bit above our level. However, we actually took to it surprisingly quickly and compared to our prelim task, the use of after effects has show a drastic change in ability. With after effects we were able to control things like mood of the piece, evoked thorough colour changes and things like the smoke, which just simply isn't avalible to us in final cut pro, when making our prelim film. We were also able to add different layers like our diary extracts, which enabled us to create depth to our piece which again, is an aspect of the prelim task which isnt possible.