7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?
Costume
and Location
Looking
back on when we planned our preliminary task, I think it was clear that we
hadn’t put enough thought into the actual planning itself. We all quickly
decided on the costumes that our actors should wear. These costumes did look
appropriate considering we were directing an interview, but we didn’t give the
costumes very much specific thought. For the location, we decided on using a
small office in the college which we thought was a good idea at the time. I
think we could have chosen slightly better location if we gave ourselves the
time to think as the office we used was quite cramped for us all to fit in. We
were sure we wanted to use an office-looking place with a desk, computer and
chairs to make it look more professional, which I agreed it did, but had we
given ourselves more planning time on details, we could have chosen it better.
I believe
we were a lot more organised when it came to planning our thriller opening.
When we chose the different costumes for each character, we definitely put a
lot more thought into it. We took each crew member’s thoughts and opinions and
used that to help us agree on the types of costumes they should wear, which
turned out to be very effective. We carefully thought about which settings we
wanted to use. A while before starting to film, we asked Starbucks (a setting
we chose for our characters to meet) if we could have permission to film in
their shop, to which they said yes. However, Starbucks cancelled on us last
minute; we fixed this problem by quickly, but thoughtfully, turning Ella’s
house into a believable café setting.
Sound
When we
began our preliminary task, we learnt about how to use Foley effects and how to
make them effective and believable to the spectator. Although we didn’t use very
many of these Foley effects in our preliminary, we felt like we had learnt
enough from other sources that we would be confident in using them in our
thriller opening. In our preliminary, we used diegetic ‘office’ sounds to make
the setting more believable as we were actually filming in a room with nobody
else other than our two actresses.
When we
filmed our thriller in all locations, we had a separate sound recorder
recording all the time to catch every detail and record synchronous sound
alongside the video. Although it didn’t seem like the separate recorder made
much difference to the sound, we still used in while we were editing the video.
This meant we had to match up that sound with the film, which turned out to be
time consuming each time we had to match them up exactly. Some of our shots in
the final film are several seconds long, for example in the scene where one of
our actresses was chopping up vegetables in the kitchen. We filmed each scene
more than three times so we could choose the best out of the three (or more).
This meant that sometimes the sound was better in one take but the film was not
the best, so we would have to mix up the different shots and sounds. It took a
while each time to match the sounds with the action on screen (for example,
each individual chop of the knife), but it was clearly effective and shows how
much effort was put into each little detail.
Editing
When we
edited our preliminary task on Final Cut Pro, there was not very much to do. We
only filmed the whole thing twice, three times at the most, which meant there
was very little content to ‘edit’ other than making sure we had followed the
criteria and rules, such as the 180 degree rule, shot reverse shots and a match
on action. The sound we used was recorded at the same time as filming so we had
no other alternatives. We placed some office sounds in the background to add
realism to it and hadn’t put too much thought into it.
I think we
were very organised when we began editing our thriller opening. Once we put all
the footage we had captured onto the computer, we watched each take, labelled
them appropriately and gave each one a mark out of 10. For each take we knew we
were not going to use in the final film due to it just being an outtake or
problems with the equipment, we put into a folder called “Outtakes”. After
deciding which pieces of footage we were going to use and put them all in place
in Final Cut Pro, we watched it through several times to make sure we had not
made any mistakes in the editing. Once we were happy with what we had produced,
we added some other effects in, such as transitions, and other Foley sounds,
such as gunshots. During the scene where Natalie was phoning Hannah is various
places on her walk, we placed a voicemail tone over the top of the film.
In our
preliminary, we used the white balance on the camera and there was a noticeable
difference between no effect and white balance. For our White Collar Complex
opening we used a different camera and we were not sure how to set up the white
balance, so it looked like some things in some shots had a yellow/orange tinge
to it. When we watched these takes on the computer, we successfully used a
colour corrector to remove the yellowy colour.
Lighting
When we filmed our preliminary task, we only used natural lighting which
came from the sun through a window and the light in the office where we filmed;
we did not use any of our own lighting or reflectors which didn’t help the
colouring of the subjects. We learnt from this so when it came to filming our thriller
opening, we used both natural light and our own filming lights that we got to
create a more naturalistic light. It also made sure that each shot’s lighting
was the same in the same scene.
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