Evaluation Question 7

Through this journey of knowing little about different editing softwares to know knowing how to use the softwares effectively I can say that I have matured in my editing skills in our final thriller opening. We used many different softwares to ensure we got the maximum and our full potential showed in the thriller opening. Getting feedback and re-working on small shots, changing small sections and being able to produce a 2-3 minute opening for a thriller allowed us to see how experience and research can create a thriller opening that creates the effect we wanted.

Pre-production was made quite difficult for us as we had different ideas as to which would be more exciting for our audience, most were based along the same lines, having a female main character was put across in all of our ideas because we only had girls in our group and also would challenge conventions and stereotypes of females, which was brought across well in our final opening.

Our preliminary task didn't have good lighting, as we only had a short time to film and plan we had to think quick on our feet so we could get good footage. However the lighting was a problem. We first filmed with natural lighting, on the camera we could just about see what was happening, which we thought would create suspense and tension, but when we put it back onto the computer the lighting had decreased and hardly anything was visible, we had to reshoot that scene in the small room again using an artifical light (DIDO light),which gave a bright spotlight on our character. Personally I didn't like using artficial light because it made it look more like a crime thriller than a psychological thriller.

However we did get all the shots we were told to do and more. We also did this in our final opening. We used as many possible shots as we could without making it look over done and I think we achieved this really well.

Storyboarding was quite quick and easy, by that time we had a full idea on what we were going to produce and the different type of shots we were going to do. The prelim was quite short and we used close up shots of a hand to create mystery before entering the room.

Both the prelim and final thriller opening were narrative openings. But we used Captive over a blank screen to ensure the audience could memorise this.

The costumes used in our prelim were casual clothing, as we didn't have to much time to prepare it was quite difficult to get a costume ready, we still created an element of surprise.

Editing shots were quite easy, we always had in mind the 180 degree rule because we know that is important and allows the audience not to get confused. We stuck to this rule and we used it effectively. Match cutting in our prelim we used a  hand opening the door. We also used something similar in our thriller opening, when the main character pulls of a poster from the wall, it is a match cute from closeup of the hand to a medium shot of her walking.

The sounds we used were also from he 'dissonant' category in Soundtrack, we feel that this is a really effective category to use when creating a tense atmosphere. We used it effectively in our Prelim and in our final opening.