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

I think what worked best about our preliminary was the variety of shots we used and that they flowed well from one to another. Which also is a strength in my thriller piece, as we also used a variety of camera shots and angles, however the way I have progressed from my preliminary to my thriller opening is the way we edited it. In our thriller we used more transitions which worked well with our thriller as the piece was slow and it made it flow from clip to clip easier. The transitions also helped to give tension, such as the cross dissolve which gave suspense in this part of a thriller mainly.

In our preliminary some of the footage unfortunately had objects in the background such as the apple and the PE lesson, so when we came to filming our thriller opening we were more aware of our surroundings, making sure no tripods or bags were in shot.

In both pieces we kept to the 180° rule. In our preliminary as we filmed the boys part on a different day to the girl approaching the bench, we nearly broke the rule but when we realised we made sure and luckily we hadn’t. In our thriller, we also managed to keep to the rule throughout the piece meaning it was successful.

These are the slides from our pitch to our class, this shows the location, costume, props and camera shots we wanted to use to produce our piece. We also used a wordle to show key words to explain our idea.

This is the story board we produced whilst planning our thriller opening. As you can see in our planning we wanted the girl which found the body to be a dog walker, however on the day of filming unfortunately the dog we were going to use was no longer available so we improvised around this and simply took the dog out. This wasn’t a huge disaster as we were worrying about the practicality of using a dog and being able to make it do what we wanted. 

The best improvement from our preliminary to our thriller opening was our titles. In our preliminary we used a freeze-frame and used the text on the iMovie.

However, in our thriller they were a lot more creative and fitted well with our piece and made it flow. Also the transition between the text and the sunrise also made our titles more unique and effective.

One part that worked best in out thriller was the range of shots and the way our piece has been edited together. I also think the speed of our piece makes it more tense and fits the psychological genre. When editing our thriller we became more used to the iMovie software and a lot more comfortable meaning we experienced more, for example we used more transitions which helped show our skills of editing such as the cross dissolve. However, when we came to editing our sunrise we wanted to speed it up but we were unable to have it as sped up as we wished, this meant the effect of the clouds moving wasn’t as effective as it could have been, however the slow pace fitted with the rest of the pieces pace. Another successful part was definitely our titles; everyone who gave us feedback thought they were really unique and effective to our piece. We were really proud of them and were pleased that they worked so well with out final piece.

Overall, to improve in our thriller we could perhaps use more than one piece of music. Most of our audience’s feedback has been to use different music for the flashbacks; this would give more of a dramatic effect to the flashbacks. However, not all of our feedback said this some people liked the same piece of music being used throughout as it added tension.