Eval Q7 Learnt since Prelim

Q7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

180 degree rule

When i first went to film our prelim, my knowledge was very small about anything to do with making films. The only things i knew were from watching TV and the 3 shot types Dave had tought us; The shot reverse shot, 180 degree role and the match on action. We tried to use every one of these shots in our prelim.







The difference between our prelim and our final piece is the fact we were trying to find shots to do in our prelim. However when going out to film it ourselves it just came naturally we knew what shots to do due to our previous research and planning and our practice runs doing our trailer, Micro-Drama and our Swede.

We also did research into many things that appear in films/ film openings. We have looked at sound tracks special effects and how to use Sony Vegas/ Final Cut Pro. However we mainly looked at what occurs alot in many film openings, things like scream queens, idents, titles and stalking scenes. from doing this we created a clear idea in our head of what to do in our opening.

We learnt how to use time management, as for our prelim their wasnt any time management we just had a lesson to do it in. However with our film opening it was a much more complicated process. Over the social website Facebook we had to arrange dates and time to meet and arrange different equipment to rent out, for example the fig rig. We had to plan locations in which would suit our film and meet there with all the equipment, a harder job than it sounds. Out of school we all have our hobbies and jobs, doing homework etc. so time management become much much harder.

Trailer Storyboard

We also learnt how to plan our film, as in the prelim it wasn't really planned, we planned it on the spot. Because the opening was much more complex and needed planning we sat down as a group and planned shot by shot how we would do it, on story boards. This helped us greatly when shooting as there was more of an organisational structure, we knew what to do and didn't just make it up on the spot. This improved our film completely as it looked much more professional than all of our other Productions

Sheet 1

Sheet 2

PitchThere are many stages up to making our final opening. We had to all pitch our ideas to the group to see which were the best ideas, pitching to try make your story appeal to the other classmates. once it was over with the pitching side we then had to chose who would star in our film, for the Dr we chose me as i looked the oldest and a reasonable actor. Then chose Curtis for being the Patient as he looked the youngest, also a good actor. The hardest person to find was the Dr's girlfriend as the other 2 characters were within our group we had to find someone suitable and reliable for the 'scream queen role' we chose heather as she suited the stereotypical scream queen role and took drama as an AS level, so we thought she was perfect for the role. Where as for our prelim it was just a matter of random choosing all the different roles.



This is our treatment explaining Audience, Age rating etc.

like the lab coat we used

Costume Props & mise-en-scene
For our prelim we didn't really have props just used advantages of what we were wearing. The only thing we really used was my hood to keep a narrative enigma going to create an atmosphere. However in our current opening we used man props, the main prop being our lab coat. this was to create the Dr/patient look. We also used things like tripods and the fig rig to create steady shots, where as in our prelim this wasn't the case as we didn't even think about using a tripod or a fig rig, keeping the camera steady didnt really cross our mind as much unlike our opening where it was one of our main focuses. We also had to think of the mise-en-scene and just everything that will be on camera from the blood to nothing being in the shots we were using.

Location To find our location was vital unlike our prelim, we had to sit down and think about somewhere that looked like an asylum in the area. The thing that come to our mind straight away was High Royds as one of my friends lives there and was the ideal location to film. We had problems when filming as it is all boarded off however we did manage to film outside which gave a great effect.

Facebook status

With our prelim it was just one film, mistakes or not. With our opening we have had many rough cuts, getting feedback for each one and realizing ourselves as well what needs to change within our opening. and making several rough cuts to get our opening as good as we possibly can. We set a status to get feedback from a lot of people on facebook. Due to George's Youtube status he had a lot of people that see this video so we got a lot of useful feedback from this!

What i personally thought was a very big challenge which didn't happen in our prelim was a soundtrack, since it was just a quick trial run it wasn't needed. However when doing our opening i realised actually how important it actually is, it makes something not scary, scary. it builds up tension and can give the audience a scare. making a soundtrack is very difficult and something we had to learn how to do.

Live Type

As well as using other technologies an important one for our film was the technology used to make our ident we used LiveType and final cut to make our idents which we used in the opening. we didn't need this in our prelim but it was very important in the opening as every major film has idents at the start.

A company ident is a way of showing the audience who is behind the film as it is a form of advertising. You tend to see a couple of idents at the start of the film before every movie starts you will never see a film without company idents unless it is extremely indie. Most idents come with their own jingle, theme song or sound. The classic Warner Bros Ident is a good example to show a sound effect used.





I think the main difference with the prelim and our final opening was the fact we used an array of different shot types and used match on action, shot reverse shot and 180 degree role without even thinking about it. it become natural. We used extreme long shots, POV shots, dutch angles, close ups to show emotion and many other shots. compared to a very small shot variety in the prelim.

In conclusion the improvements from the prelim i think are outstanding. We have learnt how to use many different shots and a variety of different film techniques and technologies to produce a film opening completely different to the prelim, being better in every different way, although the opening has no comedy element it is a very unique and a huge achievement compared to our prelim.