AS G321: Evaluation - Progression from Preliminary Task to Final Product

What have I learnt in the progression from the preliminary task to the final product?

To begin with, I feel that major improvements have been made in our horror film opening from our preliminary task as we encountered many errors and faults in our first attempt .This helped us learn from that and progress further. 

The biggest development between these two tasks was time management and organisation as these are the most important aspects of film production. In our preliminary task, the filming day was unstructured and unorganised as we were only working from a storyboard and script, which was not a professional route. In order to progress we needed a filming journal or itinerary that would keep us on track and moving smoothly. Specific times should be allocated for certain shots so that we are able to start and finish in good time without causing more stress to the cast and film crew. Luckily, we learnt from our faults and we incorporated this within our main task which helped us a lot as the actress felt less pressure and the crew were organised and calm. 

Sophie and I also added an hour at the end of our filming day for our Main Task to allow us to complete any unfinished scenes or shots, or to retake certain parts so that it was of best quality. We did not do this in our Preliminary task which was a huge mistake as we had to use shots and angles that we didn't specifically like or wanted, this made our task less complete and messy. 

In our Preliminary task, we didn't have much knowledge of mise en scene, lighting or colour as we had high key lighting throughout and it clearly didn't make sense. 

When the heartbeat sounds start to increase, the artificial lighting stays high whereas, it should have darkened and become more eerie to reflect what is happening. This was a bad mistake as the audiences emotions stay the same and the suspenseful scene creates no atmosphere. However, we noticed this when planning our Main Task and made sure that, low key lighting and dull colours are used in certain scenes. This was effective and our focus group gave positive feedback for this. 

For post production, there was a significant change from our preliminary task. We continued to use Adobe Premiere for our editing stage as it allowed us to experiment with many different features and options. In our Preliminary task for example, the sound wouldn't change volume in different scenes and this was evident when the heartbeat began. There was no slow increase it just suddenly started. However, in our Main Task, we used the 'Audio' option and altered the soundtrack volume in certain areas so that it could be heard, yet wasn't too overpowering and attention shifting. Also, ambient sounds were less evident in our main task than in our preliminary, this shows that our professionalism developed and when filming, we focused more on the characters actions and dialogue rather than what was heard around her. 

As for transitions, we kept to the dip to black as it looked professional and smooth which was perfect for both of our tasks. We mainly used this transition in our Main Task credits to keep the pace slow and suspenseful. As for our Preliminary Task, we used the transition to break each scene up. This therefore, demonstrates a progression as we looked deeper into the meaning of each transition when editing our horror film opening. 

By making these mistakes in our Preliminary task, it taught me to be more cautious and organised in our final task, so that the process would be of higher quality and that it appealed to our target audience. Overall, knowing the features that were needed to create enigma, allowed us to plan and research in much detail to ensure the audience would be drawn to our final horror film opening.