Q7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

When I began to plan my preliminary task I only had a storyboard to go off when filming, but in the end I didn’t even use. As I didn’t use the planning I prepared it took me a lot longer to film because I was on my own as well as I didn’t have a plan to help me so it took me over double the amount of time it should have done. I learnt from my prelim task that before we began to film that we had planned, mind mapped and made sure we all knew exactly what we was doing when starting to film our opening sequence. I noticed the difference between shooting ‘Lola’ and shooting my prelim task because it took me around 2 hours to film all of my preliminary task and it took us 2 hours to film half of our footage for ‘Lola’ even though my prelim task was a lot shorter. This was all down to knowing what we needed to film at the right moment. I noticed that the footage we filmed was very similar to our story board and it helped us get the best quality of footage that we could. Even though we took some extra shots of the same shot we didn’t need to use the extra footage we filmed because our original footage was the best quality we could get. Whereas in my Preliminary task I feel like I should have taken more shots so I had a bigger variety of shots I could choose from the make the clip look professional and well thought out.

When I started editing my preliminary task the technology and apps were all new to me and it took me a lot longer to edit it on my own because I didn’t know what anything was used for. When we came to edit our final thriller we knew how it all worked, like sounds, cutting clips and knowing which shots we were going to use because we had a clear storyboard which we stuck to. The one thing that we didn’t do in the preliminary task which we included in our final piece was sound effects and non-diegetic sound. We didn’t use any noticeably fake effects that people would think straight away that they were added but we did use a track of music throughout the whole sequence which was very unnatural. This worked because the track was very freaky as well as it being very subtle and it worked with our narrative.

When editing ‘Lola’ we found out that choosing the right shots was the hardest part of the whole project because we took multiple shots of the same shot. We shot the film in 2 days, one day was in the bedroom and the second day was at the location both outside and inside (the stairs). We found this benefitted our film better than squeezing the whole film into one day because our biggest part of it was that we had plenty of natural light and because it’s in the winter season there isn’t much natural light.