Hufan Jama - Question 7 : Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

My group and I found it difficult to come up with an initial idea due to the many reasons such as location and coming up with a narrative. Location became a worry as the location in the school is under reconstruction and leaves us with limited choices. However after watching some openings/ trailers to thriller films we came to notice that we could use the fact the school is being reconstructed to our advantage as in films such as ‘prom night’ there are scenes of isolation. We then looked at some thriller films such as ‘’Prom night’’ and ‘’Black Swan’’ which inspired us and allowed us to come up with a thriller narrative of our own. Overall I feel that my confidence as well as my skills in filming and editing has improved compared to when we first began our preliminary task. 

In my progression I learnt that planning is the most important part, so we made our storyboard and our script before actually filming. I thought this was very helpful as it helped structure our piece. Because of our storyboard we knew what shots came first and how long they were going to be or if the setting was to change. This made it easy to film and if we weren’t happy with a shot we would just change it or change the duration of the shots. The main thing I learnt from my preliminary task was the ability to use the camera as well as the tripod.  I think if we hadn’t carried out a preliminary I would have found it very difficult to do the full product.

In the preliminary task we filmed a conversation between a student and teacher we only used over the shoulder shots and didn’t really expand and use a variety of shots. We also placed the camera further away from the student in order for to make the student look smaller and more vulnerable. The camera was placed closer to the teacher in order to make her look bigger and more intimidating. We used dialogue in our preliminary task but chose not to do so in our final product. We thought we could use a variety of different camera angles in the final product to make our montage look interesting rather than simple. This helped us develop our camera skills as we spent a lot of time focusing on what camera angles worked and which didn’t. Also from our preliminary task only one person was in charge of filming however we thought that each person in our group should try filming at one point, so all of us were familiar with using the camera, tracks, tripod etc. Although our preliminary task didn’t consist of any music we were showed how to add tracks onto Imovies.

Our use of Mise en scene has improved drastically since our preliminary task; the setting for our preliminary task distorts the reality in a way as our setting for our preliminary task was in a spacious room which didn’t look like a teacher’s office at all. However we thought long and hard about what the setting should look like for each character. We thought about lighting, so we used the hall, turning all the lights off but keeping the spotlights on Vanessa making her the main focus. This was effective as it made everything around the character dark. I think the location we decided on for the stalker scene was brilliant as the lighting made our character appear as a silhouette, which was amazing because it made him more mysterious as the audience were made to feel intrigued by his hidden identity

For our preliminary task we didn’t focus on clothing which had a big impact on representation as our teacher character was dress in a hood. This was subversive towards the stereotype of teachers and didn’t fit our product.  We learnt from our mistake and made sure this wouldn’t happen in our final product. Understanding the importance of costume we created character profiles, mind mapping what the characters should look like etc.

I believe our product was successful as we tried something different which was we decided to do a montage. Which I think worked well and as it showed a relationship between the two characters. Because our product was a montage we were able to use a variety of camera angles of her dance.

   

For our production company we thought long and hard on what it should have been called. We played around with a few ideas and later came to a decision that we would use a picture of an animal and example would be ‘’TriStar’’ (flying horse) or just the name of an animal for example "Lionsgate’’. So we created our own production company naming it ‘’Foxlight Productions’’. I thought the name was a really good idea however we were unhappy with the background and so we played around with the background colour and decided a dark colour was more appropriate for the chosen genre.

Overall I feel that our final product was good, however I feel improvement could have been that during the dance rehearsal (1.33-1. 41) there was a lot of empty space which wasn’t needed therefore we had to filter it. Another improvement would be the location for the dance rehearsal which looked like an empty dull hall instead of a setting which could instantly been recognised as dance studio like the space. However as we did not utilise our time efficiently we were unable to make changes and had to work with the location we had.