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

From our preliminary task we have learnt how to plan out what exactly we would need to film by planning in paper format. We wrote down what type of genre we were going to do which was for our main task a psychological thriller.

Locations were then discussed. We learnt what need to be in the scenes to convey that this is a psychological thriller therefore we used a scene in a graveyard to show this as graveyards look eerie and dark.
The Location was quite far so organising the days we would film was difficult we found out it would be hard to get all members together to film but managed through communication.










Long Shot of Graveyard.

We learnt how to fit the character to our films genre comparing to our preliminary task, we used a different genre. We had to research and learn a lot about the main tasks genre. Our character is inspired by the girl in “knowing”, we had to fit her more into the genre by using make up and her to wear school clothing.








Girl character from "Emily".









Girl character from "Knowing".


We found out that Psychological thrillers are a sub genre which contains some elements of horror.

Learning from our storyboard we had to change some scenes as there were problems to filming in the locations. An example of this is the swing scene, at the time many children would go to that park we filmed at, we found out this made the scene unconventional into our genre. We needed the park to look quite deserted but at a certain time because we did not want the recording to be too bright or dark. Comparing this to our preliminary task we filmed indoors. We did need to take the lighting into consideration as we did not want to use natural lighting because it made the room look too dark, we did not want to use natural lighting because we were new to filming and to keep the lighting constant we used artificial lighting. Diegetic and non- diegetic sounds were used in the main task. We learnt to make our own soundtrack with Garage Band; some of the sounds we found were very effective and were right for our film.

Deleted swing scene.

New opening scene.

During the filming process we discovered in both preliminary and main tasks that we added more camera shots. We used some of the camera shots from our preliminary task, we used the match cut from the close up of the hand in the first task and we used this when our character walks up the stairs and she puts her hand on the banister as she turns. We feel we have improved this shot, and we also experimented with other shots. From the preliminary we had to work with a written task where as in the main task we were free to use as many shots as we wanted but under a certain time. We tried camera shots we did not use and tried a high angle shot which worked well looking down at the character. From our preliminary task we were told to take note of the 180° rule. If the rule was not used the characters movement would look odd and this would make the footage not run smoothly.

Overall a lot of the skills we learnt from our preliminary task were very useful. We learnt how to use a variety of new camera shots and learnt a new genre of film, what the conventions in the genre were and how to find alternatives to problems we faced.