Evaluation of Preliminary Task- Charlotte Coyle

I found the preliminary task to be quite successful. We were able to complete our re-search, story board and script on time. As we were on time, we were left spare time at home to perfect our story board and script, we used this to our advantage.

Filming was unfortunately disrupted as our school had to be closed due to the snow. As a group we were able to work pass this and complete the task on time. When school had re-opened we were able to begin filming and chose school to be our setting. We filmed over three days, but to make it look realistic we made our actors wear exactly the same thing each day. Even though they wore the same things and had their hair the same, we forgot about our female actress’ nails. In one shot they are painted and in the next they aren’t, this is a learning point for our main task.

When we had completed our filming we transferred all of our recorded material on to the Apple Mac’s. We were able to do this quickly by using a fire wire we were provided with. We then deleted the parts of what we had recorded that didn’t work well with our thriller. When we had what we wanted left, we began to put the selected clips together to create our very own thriller extract. Timing was a big problem for us, as we wanted more than our time limit allowed, so we had to keep cutting out extract down. Our film still over ran the time limit, which was a shame. However this is a learning curve for us as we now know that we have to be ruthless.

To make our thriller complete we added music, we added this music from Garage Band which is a program on the Apple Mac’s. We didn’t add in any transitions as we wanted to keep the thriller realistic. Also in keeping with the realism theme we didn’t use many effects, the only effect we did use was the ghost effect so that when our actress turned around it was more dramatic. We also put our extract in a low sepia town just to add to the thriller conventions.

By doing this preliminary task we were able to gain a better knowledge on thrillers and how to use all of the equipment.