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

2. Planning and Research
Before creating our preliminary task we didn’t have much insight into creating a typical thriller opening or
creating emotions and presentations to meet the thriller convention. Luckily after creating this preliminary
task to get us used to the technology for our final task and show to the improvement of our skills, we
researched many thriller openings such as:
• The Village
• Taxi Driver
• American Gangster
• And many more…
From researching many thriller openings, myself, Kelly and Emily (JEK, my media group) noticed that there
was always a chase within a character or more which created a lot of tension and mystery as to why the
character was getting chased, which we were really inspired to use within our plot and so we used the chase
at the beginning of the film using a establishing shot where you see the girl running and then jump cutting
into a point of view shot with a voiceover of her breathing which continues into the title page which we feel
meet the thriller convention as it creates confusion and mystery as the audience don’t understand why she
is being chased. Also from researching and analysing ‘The Village’ we noticed there the characters were
acting in a way as if they didn’t know what was going on, which we liked as it creates mystery as to why they
don’t know, also tension as to if something may happen to them. So from being inspired from this we used
the typical ordinary day of college of girls having a conservation about the weekend and then a certain
premonition/dream, which we used normally wide angle shots to show all the characters there and also
close ups to show each of their emotions to make the audience away of how they’re feeling/reacting.

3. Screenshot of
iMovie, editing
Editing the over the
shoulder shot
Comparing back to our preliminary task a lot of improvements have been made as
we’ve had a longer time to get used to iMovie (the editing programme we used to
edit our film) such as using music and voiceovers which we didn’t use in our
preliminary, also shortening our scenes as in the preliminary there is a pause before
the two character begin to talk. Where as in our final task we have used
transitions, voiceovers, shortening and music, as no one in my group had much
experience with Mac laptops before it was a hard start to get used to the software
but it didn’t take long for the group to get to trips with it as most things were very
clear to use. Also we were lucky within the music selection as when looking for a
certain type of music for the 180 degree shot it became a challenge to find the
perfect sound effect for this, but lucky using iTunes it was easy for us to import onto
iMovie and only use a section of the music. We used many different transitions to fit
into the thriller convention, where as we kept to similar transitions within our
preliminary which made it quite boring and didn’t create any emotions. Also when
editing the final task, after all three of us had researched and analysed many thriller
openings we all had many different ideas which we could incorporate into the
process into editing the final task to help create the movie to fit in the thriller
convention.

4. Filming
When filming our preliminary we didn’t have any troubles with the video
camera, as it was easily portable as of the size and the weight of the video
camera, but we didn’t present many camera angles. So its clear to see in our
final task, we used a lot of camera angles to show the characters emotions
and establishing where and who is in the scene at the time. Also it was easy at
the beginning of the film for the character to hold the video camera when
running, also the video camera captured the sound of her breathing which
was very effective and we continued to use within our editing process. And
when creating other camera angles such as over the shoulder shot it was easy
to move about. Although when using close ups the video camera didn’t
always focus quickly, which could give the impression that we edited that into
the film but unfortunately it wasn’t something we could improve although it
wasn’t a very big problem. There wasn’t any main problems when filming the
final task as our group knew exactly where and when the shots will be, as
before filming we took a long time planning and researching to create our
movie to the thriller convention.