Evaluation Question 7

We feel like throughout the steps of making the opening to our thriller we have progressed incredibly throughout. We have gained many skills that we did not have when starting. We have learnt and experimented with different shots which were used in our film and showed how different shots and lighting can create different moods and atmospheres. Also we have also gained group skills as working in a group constantly to make a big project is not something we have particularly had to do much before. We learnt that each section of making a film takes a lot of thinking even the things we thought would be easy and straight forward like costumes and props. As we progressed we learnt the importance of them and how simple things like different props can show a persons character and personality, but also helps explain the story more to the audience. Overall as a group we now understand much more the steps and how to make a film.

Our skills as a group in film making increased greatly. We had to learn from scratch how to use the software needed as none of us from the group had any experience with it before. We now know we must leave a lot of time when editing the film as it takes a lot of time to complete. We have realised how important sound is for a film as it completely sets the mood and genre. The added effect of putting a foley soundtrack over our thriller opening completes the whole thing by giving it the realistic values it has to withhold to look professional. When finding our main soundtracks for the opening we had trouble finding one that suited our film whilst also keeping the mood intact that we set out to achieve. Therefore we found that layering different soundtracks together worked better to create the eery intense mood we finally successfully did achieve. With the dialogue, we only had 3/4 lines in the whole opening and the way we filmed this meant that the character was not in shot so this made it easier for us to make the volume and pitch of the doctors voice high enough that you could clearly hear the dialogue that was intended at a reasonable level. 

After getting our idea for the film we then had to develop our skills in camerawork and the actual filming of it. We have learnt a lot about filmmaking and gained a lot more knowledge increasing our skills from doing our preliminary to final film. Although when coming to added our final edit to our production blog we had an unfortunate incident involving our clip being deleted by one of our team members losing the device. Although by then we had already gained the skills needed to be able to continue and produce our final opening as well as being able to edit some of the frames to work better in our opening to ensure that within the two minutes it made 100% sense. The skills developed in filming and practicing our editing techniques especially involved realising the different strengths that each member in our team withheld so this making the editing process faster knowing we could split the task accordingly. In our final edit each frame is heavily edited in either brightness, contrast, exposure, saturation etc to add to the mood that we set out the create.