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

I have learnt a lot while doing this thriller opening, I filmed most of our thriller opening. With filming came a lot of new techniques to learn. One of them for example was having to hold the camera in my hands and over a stair case to film Mia coming up the stairs. With this certain shot I had to make sure that the camera didnt shake or wobble around too much that we wouldnt be able to fix it in the editing stage, I also had to be careful not to drop the heavy camera down two floors and lose all of our footage we had filmed that day.

Another skill we had to develop and progress that we didnt have to do in our preliminary- was to be able to dress a room in a way that you wouldn't find it and then put it back the way we found it.
 

 

This is the room the way we had it before dressing it for our opening. We didn't have a main room in our preliminary, so to go from have different locations all the time to then having one room was difficult to change and get all our ideas in that one room. We had a long conversation before dressing the room how we was going to get all of the props- papers, bible clippings, newspapers, bottles, mattress, the doll- in the shot without it looking too messy or too put together and make it obvious. When we did our preliminary we didn't have this problem because we didn't have any room dressing to do, so then having to do it in our thriller was quite a lot harder.

 

We used a continous sound in our preliminary and our thriller, however we added sound effects in our thriller to make it more realistic than our priliminary was. This was quite hard and advanced our skill because we had to know and be able to make the sound count at the exact moment and action happened in the footage. We never had to do this with the preliminary.



Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

We decided that it would be better to look around the Red Hall before we started filming. I went around with Beth and Mia, to take photos of different angles, rooms, outside shots and objects located inside and outside. By having these photos it enabled us to plan our thriller better, it helped to plan the shot list, prop list and the actual storyline to the opening.

These are the shots that I took when visiting the Red Hall.

 

These are only a small number of pictures that I took to help us. There is a picture of the main room we used, by having this picture we was able to decided how we would move the objects out of the way and where they would go. We also was able to plan how we was going to hide objects that we couldn’t move away.

I have learnt a lot from this project as a whole, I haven’t ever done a big media-filming project like this, so I was quite new to it all.

I have developed as a filmmaker, by my camera skills the most from this project; I filmed most of the clips for our thriller opening, I had to get different angles, frames, height and a different range of shots. By doing all of these different elements of camera work, I was able to develop and give our opening a good range of shots.

I haven’t really ever done any editing on iMovie before so when we was adding things and taking things out, I was constantly learning and finding out new things, this was the same with Beth and Mia. We was all learning and making errors together.

One of the main things I learnt when we were in the editing process was how to put sound onto the opening.

We had to look for this button on the side of iMovie. 

When we pressed the ‘Sound Effects’ button this menu popped up in the left hand side corner of the screen. Scrolling down this menu you will be able to pick any iMovie sound effect that iMovie have stored onto the programme.

 If you have a sound effect on your iTunes that you want to put onto your opening, then you have to press the iTunes button that is above from the sound effects button.

This menu pops up in the left hand side of the screen. You can scroll down the menu and drag any of your music that is in that section to your project.

Q5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Me, Beth and Mia have done a voiceover for our thriller opening. We then put this onto YouTube.com with our final edited thriller opening.