Evaluation Question 7

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


As a group and individually we have all improved over the project, especially since doing the preliminary task. Looking back at the preliminary task you can spot easy mistakes that you would notice in your first take now. Back when we started the preliminary task we only knew basic shots and didn't experiment, we used a long shot, a medium shot and a medium close up. There was also no variation in the shots they just came on and stayed there for a long time. We also never used a tripod while filming, which made it very shaky, a very amateur mistake we see now.

An example of what shaky footage
could look like.

We have improved all over since we first filmed the preliminary task, the only thing that we knew was the 180° rule. As I said before, the camera is awfully shaky during the filming of our preliminary task, now when we go to film we use the tripod for almost every shot just to make sure it doesn't shake, as we have no idea if the shot is shaky until we get back to the classroom to edit, this loses us massive amounts of time which we found out in our first rough cut. 


Our shot selection has improved massively since we first started, from our first rough cut to our almost final cut you can see a lot of changed shots even though the location has stayed the same throughout. Previously we had discussed using a shot through a wall which had holes in it to let air pass through, we set up a camera in the other room as an experiment, and used different light levels to see if we could pick anything up. To our surprise we were able to see a man walking past fully which we are now using. We now know why we should use camera angles, an example of this is in our final cut, we have used Final Cut to create a CCTV type footage effect and used a very high angled shot to detail this, it makes the victim look weak. 

A camera, similar to one
we film with

The mis-en-scene we chose for our preliminary task looking back was a terrible place. It made it very difficult to film as bars were placed from the ceiling into the floor. This made it difficult to get any longshots of the pair sitting at the table, causing us to only use medium and close up shots. In our recent rough cuts we have learnt to use selective filming, to film only the parts of the location that we want. This is key to our horror film as the location we filmed was a busy street, and horror film locations are notorious for being rural. 


Another problem we faced in not only the preliminary task but also on the first rough cut was keeping the camera in focus, we found this difficult in several places such as the outside scenes as the light would ruin the shot that we would try to gather.