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

Raj Desai

Looking back at the preliminary task, I learnt a lot of key skills such as editing, camera-work and various aspects of mise-en-scene.  It was really educational doing the preliminary task as our group learnt to collaborate and listen to each others ideas.

We were all inexperienced when it came to filming so we all had to learn how to use the camera and what each shots mean and how they were used. In our preliminary task, we made many careless continuity editing mistakes so we made sure we don't do that in our final opening scene for our chosen genre.

We took the experience and knowledge we got from the preliminary task and implied it to our final opening scene by improving on what we didn't do well.

As a group, we made many mistakes, we also improved on the mistakes for example, we asked our friends to criticize our film opening and most of them said they couldn't see the credits clearly. This mistake maybe because we didn't add any credits to our preliminary task so we didn't know how to add them. We immediately went back to our film opening and changed the titles by doing some research on conventional thriller opening scene credits to make them seem more consistent and clear to the audience. This shows how my group acted quickly to criticism.

Credits can't be seem clearly

As you can see below, in our preliminary task, you can see James holding the script for Nikhil. The shot wasn't taken properly so it exposed the script and the protagonist is looking at it. This is a continuity error as the script appeared randomly. 

When we recorded the opening scene, we made sure that we add low-key lighting as it's conventional. We didn't think about it in our preliminary, it's very bright in the background which is odd for a thriller genre. You can see the difference by comparing the first still image to the one beside it.

We didn't take costume into consideration because we didn't think it was that important but after researching by looking at other thriller film openings, we realised that costume is one of the key factors for most of the media text.

Therefore, we assigned Daniel to be in charge of Costumes. In the preliminary task, our protagonist is wearing casual clothes since we didn't have time to change and we didn't think it through. On the other hand, for our final production, he's wearing a shirt and pyjamas as he just woke up from a coma and he's in his house. His clothing also attracts our target audience as he's wearing a branded shirt so teenagers can relate.

Before

After