Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you think you have learnt from the progression from it to the full task?

The preliminary task helped us to progress for the main task during the preliminary we were able to acquire the skills we needed in order to create a short and easy first task attempt. We needed to do this in order to learn different camera skills and different shots; it also helped us to learn a wide range of filming rules and techniques, which we later went on to use in our main piece

During the preliminary task we learnt how to plan out our piece, this has helped us as it showed us how to plan our final piece. This planning helped us to work together well as a group, to choose the locations to use and to decide on filming days and roles for our group members. The planning also helped us to decide after some research what genre we wanted our film to be, we knew we wanted to make a piece that built tension so after looking into it we found that a physiological thriller would be best, as it includes both action and mystery, both additional aspects that we want to include to keep the audience engaged.

The experience planning helped us to know what sort of lighting, dark and gloomy to create a spooky atmosphere, and editing, colour filters in order to show different narratives, we needed in order to show our piece as the genre we wanted it, we knew what sort of things we would have to consider in order to get a good location. We also knew in order to show different time periods, different filters would be needed as this would create a contrast that the audience would find easy to spot when watching our piece; we made sure that each time we saw the same narrative we saw the same colour filter. Although in our preliminary we did not include music we knew that from planning the preliminary in our planning for the main task we had to decide what type of music would be needed when making our piece, the music we chose helped to create a build up, we included a change in the music when the stalker appeared as this emphasised the danger he was to the girls and made the audience fear him as well. In our preliminary task we used only diagetic sound, however in the progression from our preliminary to our actual task we knew that in order to make an effective piece we would need to have both diagetic and non-diagetic sound as this engages the audience. For our piece we learnt how to use garage band and using this programme we created our soundtrack to our piece as this avoids any copy right laws which we knew if we wanted to use a certain piece we would have to get permission from the artist themselves.

From the planning of our main piece we came up with a shot list that changed slightly as we decided that the particular shot would not create the atmosphere we wanted and would not show the changes in emotions of the girl. We realised after filming our preliminary inside that the lighting was not the best and it looked quite fake, in order to get over this while filming our main task we filmed most of our piece outside. This helped as we had natural lighting, however we made sure that the unhappy moments were in gloomy weather as this added to the mise en scene as a pathetic fallacy, using weather to show the emotions, to contrast we made sure that the happier parts of the footage were when it was brighter outside as this again helps to portray emotions. Outdoors also helped to create realism within the piece as it was real places that did not look made up or created by us, this added to the effectiveness of the piece as it shows the audience that the girls are in real danger.

To edit our final piece and our preliminary task we learnt how to use ‘final cut pro’, initially the programme seemed hard but after some experimenting with different ways of cutting, different effects and different cut rates we learnt how to use the programme so that when editing we were quick and effective, this helped to enabled our piece to be made to a good standard. In our preli-



minary task we learnt to demonstrate a range of techniques e.g. a jump cut which we went on to use in the piece for the moment where the stalker is introduced and then when we later see him again. This editing technique enabled us to show the mystery of the man which therefore helped to create additional atmosphere in our opening two minutes of the film. While editing we made sure we used transitions in order to keep the piece following with no big jumps between shots, apart from the jump cut as this added to the buildup of atmosphere for the audience.

Overall the preliminary task was very helpful and definitely helped with progression to our final piece. If we had not done a preliminary we would not have created a piece to a good standard. During our final piece we learnt a lot more than what we did when just making the preliminary and therefore, if we were to do another task then we would know that the planning of the piece is crucial and that in order to get a good and effective piece you must film the same event from many different angles, as when editing this enables the audience to get a good overview of what is happening.