Task 7, looking back at preliminary task

Looking back at my preliminary task, there was very little preperation and planning towards it, however in our thriller, we spent weeks planning and had much longer to do so, it was also a lot more complex and much more into debth with what we were trying to achieve, compared to our preliminary task as we just got a week to prepare. Another way in which the preliminary task was less complex was because we got handed a sheet of instructions with what we had to do. This was different to our thriller because we had to come up with everything from scratch, and start from the begining and even draw our storyboards. However, I did find that individually, we all had different ideas, and we all found it difficult to overcome which ideas to use, therefore a big task for us was to learn how to work together as a group without arguing, therefore to fix this we all sat down and talked about all of our problems.

In the studio we built a really realistic set that looked like a really run down shabby appartment, our aim was to make our actor have OCD, however we didnt want him to come accross as clean, therefore we made sure the mise en scene made it appear really dirty and run down. This targets people of the age of 15-25 as they seem very untidy too. The next problem was building the bomb, all of us came up with lots of ideas to make a bomb seem realistic, and in the end we had to break all the ideas down, the end result turned out really well, a main source in what we used for the bomb was margarine as it looked like explosive putty, however as the day progressed it started to loose shape and go and sticky. One change that did happen that we changed the fact that the bomb was going to be strapped to the main protagonist and on the day we decided to use a teddy bear. During the opening scene of the Dark knight, the joker is introduced by carrying a briefcase and the camera slowly pans upwards to his face. Similarly, this is what we attempted to capture replacing the briefcase with a teddy bear which supposedly had the bomb in, we did this so that it would create tension and suspence towards the audience.

From day one, it was obvious on which kind of actor we were looking for, slightly dodgey looking, european... I thought it went down really well and that the actor fitted our prefrences. The lighting in the planning was not really thought of, so on the day we experimented with the lighting and looked at which looked best, at first we shot lots of close up shots with normal studio lighting, but throughout the day we decided that it looked better if the lights were constantly flickering and swinging.

On the bases of our thriller, we had lots of problems in choosing themes for it. We had to consider what pace we wanted it, what type of writing we wanted to use, colour codes, etc. After much brainstorming we decided that we would edit our thriller to be short, fast clips which are split up by title credits. By having shorter clips, the tension would gradually increase and then be broken in the title clips only again to be built up. As all our shots are close up, it is difficult to tell what exactly is going on , but our sequence shows the bomb is gradually being built throughout the whole thriller. We felt very strongly about the music in our thriller, we thought that this would help build up the suspence in each sequence, our music was made by ben, he based the music around the some of the music from the Dark Knight, we decided to use different pitched sounds during our title credits to break up our thriller and build up the suspense of what is going to happen next.

When choosing our title credits, we decided started off by planning to have our credits in a very unorganised layout but soon found this had the tendency to look messy, amateur and was sometimes hard to read, therefore we had to change the whole layout and start from the begining , & after looking at other examples from other movies, we then changed our titles to be very small and compact and constantly in the same place.

Ben created our soundtrack, & originally we planned to have an ambient sound playing along with the soundtrack, however in the end this did not all match up therefore we stuck with a none diegetic sound. Our soundtrack was based around the soundtrack from the Dark Knight , with high to low pitch.Another element that we had to consider during the period of editing, was the sound into our thriller and the title credits. We decided to use different pitched sounds during our title credits to break up our thriller and build up the tension of what could happen next in the scene.

I found story boarding and thinking about telling a story relatively easy, however during the whole process of doing so, i found that it changed dramatically throughout the whole time, by our end result, our storyboard had changed so much compared to how it was in the first place. I also feel that my development towards film making has improved, i feel this because in my preliminary task i was very unaware of how everything works, however in our thriller i found that i could understand a lot more rather than before.

In our use of camera, i feel our developments and improvements have made our thriller look a lot stronger than before. Most of our shots were close ups , which gave the feeling of OCD as everything was trapped close together, it also gave the feeling of creating much more tension and suspense. Many of our shots types were close ups, apart from a genie shot which was a birds eye view. Also some shots were altered to give the feeling of a vibrating shot. Probably the most important shot we had to capture was the bomber featured walking down a busy high street, for this we had to tilt the camera slightly upright and keep it in direct view of the rain, however we found this a lot more challenging because of the rain as we were not used to shooting in those conditions, never the less we did it and our shot turned out well.

To conclude, i found that our thriller had completely changed since our first plans, and in a much stronger way than it was originally. All the new editions to the thriller made it create much more tension and suspense

to what it originally had.