When comparing the sophistication of planning and preparation of the thriller task to the simplicity preliminary, it becomes obvious why the thriller took much longer to plan for, shoot and edit. For example, we did not storyboard our prelim or even choose a certain costume for the actors to wear; we simply found two actors, taught them the lines and shot it within an hour with no fancy camera angle shots. However, the thriller task took weeks to prepare for. We had to account for every little detail to make our thriller the most authentic. Firstly, we made power point presentation about our idea and why our group should make that thriller. Once that had been chosen we quickly set to work on the storyboarding of the sequence; this took our group in particular a long time as we all had ideas about what we could do to make our opening sequence exciting and mysterious. Next we had to ask the actors we wanted if they were available for a day of shooting, unfortunately the boys we wanted were in the A2 and we were not allowed to have them as they had exams around that time. Because of this we had to use AS boys, which actually worked better as we did need them for the whole days shooting that the A2s would not have been able to do. After actors and storyboarding had been sorted out, Megan and I travelled down to the schools costume department and selected suits, hats and a fur coat. We also had to design the set and draw a picture of what we thought it should look like. Included in the drawing were where the lights should go and some camera angle we would like to use.
Thinking about using visual expressions rather then using dialogue to move our story forward was very difficult. We tried to come up with ways to show higher tension and give the story more of a meaning and it think we did this by having the eye shots at the beginning. But at first this was very difficult as we did not know whether to have tension through speaking or just facial expressions. We collectively thought facial expressions seems more real and tense as dialogue in the preliminary task should have built up more tension then it actually did.
Throughout the day of our shoot, our whole group were learning new ways of using the camera and developing our knowledge of sound recording too. The huge different between our prelim to our main task was the use of different camera shots. In the preliminary task we had a very ordinary shot list, basically consisting of over heads, close ups and medium shots. In the thriller, we tried to experiment with shots like tracking shots, crane shots and extreme close ups. I think every one of these shots made our thriller more scary. We not only experimented with the type of shot but also the framing of it. For example, we tried to use the rule of thirds in some frames like When Tim is drinking from the top right hand of the screen this could mean he is the evil one. By doing all of the preparation we wanted to achieve a fast paced mysterious opening sequence that perhaps may people may not understand.
My knowledge of editing sound has really increased from the preliminary task. I now know to add sound effects from soundtrack pro, alter the sound tot he right volume and render the sounds. Our sequence used quite a few sound effects like doors opening, footsteps and drink drinking. We also used a room tone, this is because actually all rooms have an underlying noise that gives away their location. We do not have the soundtrack to our thriller but instead we have a combination of high pitch noises, the pitch changes when Niki enters the room and other significant things happen. We did not use any sound effects in our preliminary task, so it’s another more sophisticated aspect in the main task.Final cut server became very familiar to us throughout the course of editing. We would make new log bins as we went a long for things like sounds, then drag them down onto the time bar and cut them to when we needed them. If the sound had a bar on top of it, it had not been rendered; to do this you can press the apple button and r. Another thing we learnt to do was add in titles. To do this you pressed text, then text again. Once you selected the size, font and alignment of the words you could preview it. If you were happy with your title, simply drag it down onto the time line and cut it to how long you want it to be. We used after effects, to add a squirt of blood onto the ACE title and a muzzle flash to the gun when Guy shoos Luke. The preliminary task only took a couple of days to edit although the thriller took about 5 weeks to complete because of the complexity of the editing
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