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

Prelim Before we started our preliminary exercise my knowledge of filming, general editing and know how of media as a whole was fairly good. Throughout the preliminary exercise we learnt essentials of camerawork and editing, the purpose of the was to make a short video showing continuity. During the process we learnt a few types of shot that we had to incorporate into our piece these including; ‘shot reverse shot’, ‘match on action’ and ‘180 degree rule’. I believe that we were successful in some ways of as we used all the techniques given but did have an continuity error in our video. As we didn’t have long to plan and create the prelim time and space became issues. When we filming, we just went a location to shoot rather than specifically finding a good location to film, so we encountered a problem like finding space to put the camera with a person working the camera, another issue was that we had to rush our last shots as we were running out of time this was mainly due to the fact that we didn’t know what shot to use in-between the shots that we had to use. So this was something we change in our next project by giving ourselves enough time and to plan more by creating shot lists, storyboards etc. Delegating roles was fairly simple for our group as I knew how to work the camera prior to the prelim I became the de facto cameraman. Other roles came out fairly naturally with the other members of my group being either directors or editors.

Planning During planning we remembered that we had to create a opening title sequence that would stay relevant to the thriller genre and also remembering to create a good plan in order to make the OTS successful. First we came up with ideas for a thriller and the different sub genres of thrillers to help with the planning and also organised the plot, the characters, the narrative and the mise en scene which made it easier to come up with ideas as a group. Once we had decided on an idea for our piece we started to plan our OTS. But before we could shoot we had to find a location and recce it to check that it would be suitable for the opening title sequence. Also we create risk assessments and shot list to make sure that everything thing ran smoothly on the day of our shoot.

Logging and Rough Cut Before editing our clips we first had to organise them and watch them over to check for faults and ultimately if we need to re-shoot or not. So we renamed our clips and proceed to colour code them, green being good and red being bad. After this we came to the decision that we wouldn’t need to re-shoot and we were happy with the footage. After logging we then decided to make a rough cut, this was to help us have an idea of what our finished piece would look like. The first rough cut we created didn’t have a soundtrack or any SFX, it was just the clips in a sequence with a few transitions and section we the titles were going to go.

Final Cut Creating the final cut for our opening title sequence was a hard process as I had only used adobe premiere a few times before so lots of the editing techniques used were completely new to me, I enjoyed using the software because once a got the basics it became fairly easy. In terms of the final outcome of the opening title sequence I was very pleased with it, but there was a few bits in the OTS that could do with tightening up like some of the transitions from title to shot, however as I had spent a long time editing it, I think that some of the opening title sequences flaws went un-noticed as me and my group had spent hours working on it, it became harder to spot the details, because you were watching the same thing over and over again. During my time in this project I have learnt quite a lot more mainly to do with editing, I now know how to change the contrast and gamma of a shot to give it a different effect/style. I feel that my editing knowledge has greatly improved whilst creating this opening title sequence. I also think that my general knowledge of thrillers has been improved by creating this piece as I have learnt some of the key conventions of thrillers, e.g. their cinematography, how character are portrayed etc.