7) Preliminary

Preliminary Task

What we learnt in the progression from it to full product

When we started on our preliminary task we had little if any practical experience making a film , although we knew all the rules and regulations it was now time to put them into practice. Although we tried to create a visual appealing project we mainly used the preliminary task as practice to try out the basics like the 180 degree rule and the rule of thirds as well as experiment with a few different shot types. While doing our preliminary task we directed a lot of focus on continuity, we feel this is a key area of making any film good because without it the audience don’t feel as if it reflects real life therefore they cant engage fully in the story, therefore continuity was constantly thought upon during the entire course of making our horror opening. We have learnt so much from both analysing our preliminary task  as well as analysing other horror film openings, from doing this we were able to identify the areas where our preliminary lacked and we able to improve our knowledge and skills and then apply them to our opening. Areas we improved on were Shot reverse shot as the first time round it didn't go as well as hoped, we found it hard to replicate the same content twice and it emphasised to us the importance of having a script, or at least set dialogue. Shot reverse shot and match on action also involve the editing process, which has massively improved  during our film-making journey as we got more experienced with the way scenes should be cut as well as the software we were using.. Also for match on action we used the same idea for both projects as we felt it was easy and effective camera usage, we used a phone ringing, although it was the same we improved it second time round by adding non-diegetic ringing which made it clear to the audience that the phone was in fact ringing. Compared to our preliminary which included diegetic vibration noise which was hard to hear.

The production titles we used for our preliminary were non-existent and the opening part simply consisted of extremely basic titles listing some of the basic roles people had had in the task, this was due to our limited knowledge of editing at the time. Therefore we used editing software Sony Vegas which is simple, but had limited features making the produced footage rudimentary. Also during our preliminary everyone did everything whereas in our opening each member of our group had a specific job meaning our titles looked more official, more representative to real films. Finally during the production titles in the preliminary we just had a cloudy background to create interest and conform to the dark side of the horror genre but it is fairly bland and the audience lose interest in it quickly, whereas during the opening of our film we had already started playing the movie as the titles blended in at the bottom for the audience to glance at as they focus mainly on the characters.

As the months passed and we had done more and more editing we had gained enough knowledge to use Adobe Premier Elements editing software,  in turn this allowed us to mess around more with what sort of opening titles we wanted. We were able to pick a more suitable font as well as a better placement and size for the titles which made the overall look of it more professional.  From this we were also able to make a few production titles which in the end included "aspire productions” and “KSNH films”

Throughout our preliminary we had an extremely low variety of shots (mainly due to the short length of the finished project as a whole), the majority of them were medium shots although we did include a brief high angle shot and shot reverse shot. We concentrated on perfecting the 180 degree rule and making sure we applied it correctly to all of our shots, this is something which we continued to follow into our opening. As the weeks progressed and we evaluated opening to films, our understanding of shots became greater which we then applied to our opening, including an extreme long shot and extreme close up shots. After looking at our preliminary tasks shot reverse shot part we learnt from our mistake and improved it when filming our opening making it a smoother transition. This also emphasised another key point to our production - planning. 

In our preliminary we only briefly planned the dialog, we allowed our actors to make it up as they went, this is because we only had a short amount of time to plan and we didn't feel what was said was the most important thing, instead we concentrated on the camera skills. On the other hand during the planning of our official film opening we had a lot longer period of time to plan every detail so much more thought went into the dialog, how each word and how its said will affect the audience. We also produced a script which we published on our blog page as it showed that we had thought about it in detail.