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

In the Prelim task there was very little creativity needed as we did not come up with any of the ideas ourselves. We got given the storyboard which we had to follow down to a tee. We got given the shot types and dialogue. It was very specific and this was a good first step for us to follow so that we got used to the different shot types and using the camera. I didn't realise before this task that you had to shoot absolutely everything at all the different angles as I thought that you could just film one piece of dialogue at one angle and another at a different angle then put them together. I feel that the preliminary task really helped with my understanding of how to use the camera and the editing process (although not very creatively) as it helped me understand how to use FinalCut Pro and also how we needed to make sure that the shots really matched up. Our editing in our thriller was a lot more complicated to our prelim yet it looked also more smoother (for example the entrance of the man walking in, to sitting down).

The cast that we used for our prelim were two members of our group. We did not have any choice for who our cast was. However in our thriller we had a lot of choice who could be in our thiller - yet unfortunately one of the actors that we wanted to be in our thriller was ill. By having the choice of actors it made us able to choose people that we want for our target audience and who would be able to look realistic for the role we wanted them for. By being able to cast it ourselves it was down to us how we represented them - as we came up with the dialogue, the costume, and everything that they did. It was important for our thriller that we had the right cast for our storyline to be believable. For both of our tasks we worked well with the actors, and I think my group was a good group that made them feel at ease. For our first task it was very easy to feel at ease as we are all good friends, and from that task I took the skills of directing and used them in the making of our thriller. All of our group all wanted the same result, and we all worked as a team doing all the jobs needing to be done to produce an end result that we were all happy with. Although one of our actors was ill, the actor that filled in (Phil) really saved the day and we are pleased with his performance as he did a very good job especially considering the late notice! Both of our actors really got into role, and they looked how we wanted them to look so that they would appeal to our target audience. Here is the cast for both of our tasks (left is the prelim, right is the thriller):

                       

The fact that we could come up with our storyline ourselves and not follow a structure,  immediately made me and my group want to do a successful thriller that was completely 'original'. It was important that we listened to each others ideas, and contribute to what we would do differently and what we like - there was definitely no time for sitting back, we all had to be on the ball and say what we thought otherwise we wouldn't get anywhere. Creating the piece was all about working together as a team and really discussing ideas in detail until we decide it will work or won't work. The main thing that we wanted ours to be was unique. We wanted our idea to be something that had an immediate interest to people instead of having to go into a lot of detail to get interest.

By coming up with the idea of having a submersible we had to come up creatively how we would remake a seabed. This put up many questions of how we were going to achieve this. It had to be realistic looking, and it had to look like it was of a massive scale (like the sea). By coming up with the idea of shooting in a fish tank with an underwater camera for the shots of what the men can see, and using a Sony NX5 for the establishing shots it shows the improvement of creativity of camera work and also on the set of the thriller. Getting all of the props and really structuring how we were going to create this world took a lot of preparation but all of us in our group wanted to achieve this so we had many long chats about how we would get it right.

It was up to us what shots we did and by making the storyboard it gave us some structure that could also be broken at any time. It was a way of seeing what kind of shots we wanted so that on the day we made sure we got these but that we could change what parts we used the shots for. We decided early on that we wanted to start from black and see the submersible coming close to the camera. This is an establishing shot but also makes the audience wonder what it is. In the drawing for this shot it was a lot lighter but we really wanted that sense of mystery to be there and this was a reason for making the shots so dark. By doing shots like these it shows how much more creative I have become in the use of camera work and that the shots from the prelim were reasonably basic compared to the shots used for the thriller where I filmed with an underwater camera (Go Pro). It was great to be able to have the storyboard as it gave us a clear starting point, but by having the oppurtunity to do things completely differently made us be able to have an open mind about it. Although a lot of the shots did happen to be similar to our storyboard, by having the Preliminary task it shows that sometimes one that you think will work, may not. And we didn't realise that we would use so many shots of the seabed - but it just so happened that this is one of the most suspenseful aspects of our thriller. As soon as we came back to the two men it made the audience be able to sit back and have a breather - so it was important that we were always thinking about what would make the audience uneasy and this was something that we got mainly from the shooting day (and also in the editing process).

For our thriller we were able to use all of the editing software how we wanted to (this is something that we were not able to do during the Prelim task). We were able to create a soundtrack and add non-diegetic and diegetic sounds to our thriller. It gave us a lot of freedom and really enabled us to make it look like how we wanted it to look. One of the problems that we had was making the crash look affective. We shot the crash having our two actors reactions - however because they are both not actors their reactions did not look affective or realistic so we had to come up with a plan b. Without the software it would have been awfully hard to come up with what we could do, but we decided to take a shot of the underwater and then one of us swooshed our hand across the camera. We were able to edit the sound of the crash (which we had made by slamming a door of a metal container) with the darkness of the hand going across the shot of the seabed. This created the affect of something coming close to the submersible and crashing into it.