Evaluation, Question 8; What have you learned in the progression from your preliminary task?

Before the creating our thriller, ‘Nameless’ we were given a preliminary task. The prelim task was basically a practice run, to enable us to learn about different camera angles, how to use a camera and what not to do when using a camera. We made many mistakes whilst creating our prelim but these mistakes helped us to improve and develop and if you were compare our prelim to our final product you will see how we developed.

Narrative; before creating our prelim we had no narrative, we did not plan or brainstorm any ideas we just did everything spontaneously and improvised with what we had. This is very different to our final product being that we spent a long duration of time planning ideas, brainstorming ideas, sourcing different props and different locations. What makes ‘Nameless’ so authentic is the fact that the opening is purely driven by its suspenseful narrative, this is something that our prelim task definitely did not have.

No Genre; because of the absence of narrative, there were no narrative conventions that were represented in our prelim and because of this you are not able to figure what genre it fits in. This is very different to ‘Nameless’ because, the film score, the characters, the instant arousal, the quick edits and the narrative all represent the thriller genre.

Title Sequence; Our prelim, lacked visual qualities because of its simplistic title sequence, in ‘Nameless’ we used a stylized font to fit with the entire theme and representation of the story line. However in our prelim, we rushed and picked any font within the category in ‘LiveType’, instead of sourcing other fonts.

You can definitely see the difference in the stylised element of the two fonts, 'Nameless', represents more of a brand.

The order of the title sequence in our prelim is also something that we learned about, we learned that the sequence that we used was the wrong order. The correct order for a sequence is; the production company 'CandiStudios', the actors/actresses, the music editor,the film editor, the writer and finally the director. As you can see here, we did not use this order for our prelim.

Mise en Scene; For our thriller we used props such as, a Blackberry,artificial blood, coins, white paint, a table,a chair an upmarket flat and our college's basement. The props used for our thriller made our narrative, without it our thriller would not make any sense. The locations used helped to represent the social group of city proffessionals, this is very different to our prelim being that the location that we used did not represent a social group. The only props that we used in prelim was the props that were provided by our media teachers, for instance, the table and chairs in glass. The lighting in our prelim was extremely bright, it effected some of our shots being that we were unable to see the leading character.

 Here is some examples of props used in our thriller opening.

                                Here is an example of the classroom that we used in our thriller.

Camera Shots; In the prelim we did not edit shots correctly, many of the shots skip and some are too long, a good example of this is when the leading character is walking down the hall way, this scene  is too long, it had nothing to do with the narrative and personally i thought that after watching it i became bored. Originally the idea was to do this so that the audience question where she is going but it did not need to be as long as it was. For 'Nameless' there is a similar scene when the characters meet in the basement, what makes this scene different from our prelim is the fact that we used a quick edit, the edit allowed the audience to see the 'Nameless' caller doing various actions, what made this more effective than the prelim was how the suspense was built and how we kept the audience entertained by making transitions from shots.

Soundtrack; Another difference between our prelim and our final thriller opening is the soundtrack. The sound that we used for our prelim did not relate to the narrative and we only used it in the beginning. In our final product we created a variety of non digetic sounds, for instance; the coin sound, the door slamming, the texured , atmospheric, suspensful, droning sound use in the backingground and the quick violins.In our prelim we did not use any sound to emphasize every day actions , like closing a door.

In my conclusion i would like to say that we learned and progressed from our prelim and this is shown through our different props, locations, characters, locations and sound.