Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progress from it to the full product?
The preliminary task was a continuity task Ā involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. It should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule. Otherwise we had free choice over the other micro and macro elements. Therefore our focus was on fulfilling these tasks and facing the challenge of adding dialogue into our film as we never had done it before. This however later reflected on our task itself.
First of all the storyline. While we created several drafts of the dialogue in our preliminary task, after all we knew from the beginning that it should be a short, explaining sequel to our final film, we never really used one of them and made the text up during filming with what we wanted to say in mind. This took the fluent pace out of our conversation, added to the problem that we later had to cut bits of it out to not go over the maximal allowed length. We struggled with recording and later editing the conversation as well, as even though we used a clipboard as help, we sometimes couldn't place the sound fitting to the mouth movement. With this struggle in mind, we therefore Ā decided not to use dialogue in our final film at last. We already had the story in mind and knew a digetic conversation would be unnecessary to the action and wouldn't further the horror effect.
A huge improvement in our camera work can also be seen in a comparison of our preliminary task and our final film. Next to fulfilling the requirements in our preliminary task, we wanted to have very creative, well made shots like camera panning. So we focused on those and not on an actual idea when we use which shot. It made the whole process very chaotic as we had no planning. This is later seen in the finished film through shots through jumpy shots. Our best shots were our action matches, even though they seem a bit short now in reflection,
and our Extreme Long Shot at the beginning with the lens flares, which was a bit too long.
Furthermore all our shots were somehow quite shaky and not smooth, like in this panning shot, even though we filmed with a tripod. This is a very grave mistake in a film if you don't do it intentionally. Therefore we tried our best to avoid this in our final film.
In our final film we knew exactly what we wanted to present, the whole film was planned through. We knew from where to where the character had to get and which atmosphere we wanted to create with our framing ā a claustrophobic feeling. Therefore we new which shots were needed, were we could use action matches Ā and where we could be more creative and try different shots out. We created a similar action match of going through a door like in our preliminary task, though we improved it and really thought about what we wanted to show in the action match and why and which framing we would use.
The other action match was an improvement as well as we wanted to show a sudden movement and we had to check that everything was always in the right place, even my flying hair.
We even managed to create a jump scare which is an essential convention in a horror film and requires the right timing, the right framing and the right sound.
Furthermore we looked out for things we completely ignored in our preliminary task such as the lighting - Ā we had two kinds of lighting to emphasise the time differences and the different characters.
Then we made a lot of effort for the titles. In our preliminary task we didn't thought about them until we had to edit them in and our only possibility was to find a shot where they would fit in, don't distract to much from the action and still look good. In our final film we wanted that the titles have their own sequence, as for one they would disturb the actual film and secondly we wanted to have more freedom to play with them, make them interesting and let the audience focus on them. We clearly succeeded at that.
We also gave us more time in the editing process of our final film then for our preliminary task to look out for small continuity mistakes we had to fix, to have the smoothest transitions, something that our preliminary task was clearly lacking of, and to play around with effects and sounds.
When I first started Media Studies, I knew nearly nothing about cinematography and how to create a perfect film, but now, having finished the final film I can clearly say I learned a lot. Not just about the technologies such as how to use a camera and Final Cut Pro, but my thinking about films has changed a lot. While I was not even aware what I could look for in a film to further interpret the action, I now feel like my way of watching films has changed, that I look out for different framing's, shot techniques, lightings, movements... I learned that creating a film means working as team, and I luckily had the best team to work with, and being organised, to plan things from the beginning and to always try to think of representations, the conventions of cinematography and what you want to say with your film before you decide on a shot. I can definitely say I feel more confident in creating a short film now then I did in the beginning, thanks to all I've learned.
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