Evaluation Question 7

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

Looking at my preliminary task, I feel that the preliminary is very different to my main production, the preliminary task was very silly and had the same shot over and over again. The genre of the preliminary is also very different to the genre of the production. For our preliminary, we had a very comedic and cheerful genre, and for our main production, we decided to go for a more serious genre which was an action/horror hybrid.

For the camerawork of our preliminary was predominately an over the shoulder shot of one of the characters when the other is talking, we also did a few long shots and an extreme long shot that tracked Owen’s character. In our main production, we used as many different shots as we could, we used an extreme long shot, a long shot, a medium shot, a point of view shot and a close up. We wanted to use a wide range of different shots for our main production and we wanted to make some of these shots creative to show off what we can do, one of these shots that shows our creativity is the CCTV camera shot, which was filmed with a GoPro camera that was placed on a shelf near the ceiling. Another creative shot we used was the point of view shot where you see the scene through the protagonist’s eyes, this shot was creative because we darkened the shot and added a slight red overlay to make it seem like the protagonist is battered and tired.

Our dialogue in the preliminary task seemed very awkward and not realistic at all as it was all improvised, we also sometimes started smiling during the dialogue in it too, which we fixed in the production. The reason behind the awkwardness and unrealism of the dialogue in the preliminary is that we did most of it first take as we didn’t want to spend too much time on it as the quality of it wouldn’t affect the mark given. For the main production, we did many takes of the same shot and rehearsed some lines before we filmed a shot so we could make it as realistic and make the acting look natural. This payed off for our main production as throughout the majority of it the acting and dialogue sounds and looks much better than in the preliminary.

Another thing we worked on was colour, as the two genres we went for were very different, the preliminary was supposed to be comedic, light-hearted and silly, which would need bright and cheerful colours like the whites and blues in the background, whereas the main production had very dark colours, like the grey bricks on the wall, grey concrete floor, a dark room, and even the navy and black of the protagonist’s clothes and the full black attire of the antagonist are both dark colours.