Evaluation Task 7

 Task 7

Malevolent Phantom

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

While doing our preliminary task we were instructed to focus solely on continuity, we feel this is a key area of making any film good because without it the audience don’t feel as if it reflects real life therefore they cant engage fully in the story, thus continuity was constantly thought upon during the entire course of making our horror opening. We have learnt so much from both analysing our preliminary task  as well as analysing other horror film openings, from doing this we were able to identify the areas where our preliminary lacked and we able to improve our knowledge and skills and then apply them to our opening. Areas we improved on were Shot reverse shot as the first time round it didn’t play smoothly, this also involves the editing process which has massively improved  during our film making journey. Also for match on action we used the same idea for both project as we felt it was easy and effective camera usage, we used a phone ringing, although it was the same we improved it second time round by adding non-diegetic ringing which made it clear to the audience that the phone was in fact ringing. Compared to our preliminary which included diegetic vibration noise which was hard to hear. 

Production titles during our preliminary were extremely basic this is due to our small knowledge of editing at the time therefore we used editing software Sony Vegas which is easy, but had limited features making the produced footage rudimentary. Also during our preliminary everyone did everything whereas in our opening each member of our group had a specific job meaning our titles looked more official more representative to real films. Finally during the production titles in the preliminary we just had a cloudy background which the audience lose interest in quickly, whereas during the opening of our film we had already started playing the movie as the titles blended in at the bottom for the audience to glance at as they focus mainly on the characters.

As the months past and we had done more and more editing we had gained enough knowledge to use Adobe Premier Elements editing software which allowed us to play around with it as much as we please,  from this we were also able to make a few production titles which in the end included ,”aspire productions” and “KSNH films”

Throughout our preliminary we had an extremely low  range of shots, majority of them were medium shots although we did include a brief high angle shot and shot reverse shot. We concentrated on 180 degree rule which we continued to follow into our opening. As the weeks progressed and we evaluated opening to films, our understanding of shots became greater which we then applied to our opening, including an extreme long shot and extreme close up shots.

After looking at our preliminary tasks shot reverse shot part we learnt from our mistake and improved it when filming our opening making it a smoother transition and more planning.

 In our preliminary we only briefly planned the dialog, we allowed our actors to make it up as they went, this is because we only had a short amount of time to plan and we didn’t feel what was said was the most important instead we concentrated on the camera skills. Although during the planning of our official film opening we had a lot longer period of time to plan every detail so a lot of thought went into the dialog and how each word and how its said will effect the audience. We also produced a script which we published on our blog page as it showed that we had thought about it in detail.