Preliminary Task Evaluation

"For our Preliminary task we created a short minute long clip for a Thriller. In this we made reference to the Coen Brothers.

We did this in a few ways, the first being the soundtrack, it was light-hearted and cheerful which created a contrast with the general genre and it leads the audience into a false sense of security. We found that this was very effective, especially with the voiceover which was done simultaneously.

The voiceover is also a reference to the Ceon Brother’s Style of film – the content of it often tells a life lesson, possibly one about money or crime. In our task the voiceover introduced the storyline before the characters are confirmed, which gives an aura of mystery. We found that these two aspects together was one of the strongest aspects of the preliminary task and we’re probably going to use it in our final Thriller.

Along with these we mimicked the Coen Brothers by the use of Panning and Establishing shots, this technique has been used in most of their films, notably the desert plains used in No Country for Old Men. This technique helped create an isolated feel to our preliminary task which was vital to the narrative and characters used as it helped establish the victim as vulnerable strait away.

In the main opening sequence we didn’t show the characters strait away, instead focussing on certain objects and features, for example the paper and the legs. This further solidified the mysterious atmosphere as the audience is still left in the dark.

In a few ways strayed from the norm of the Coen brothers, mainly through the voiceover which would usually be done in a male voice but due to the fact that every member of our group was female we chose to have a girls voice instead so it matched the narrative on camera.

Something that we found both effective and ineffective was the lighting that was used. We found it difficult to create shadows due to the setting which we chose. We actually used a torch that was on my phone, which wasn’t very powerful. 

In certain places the shadows were unsuccessful, for example when we first used lighting on the shot of Bethany’s face we found that the result made an artificial yellow tint, instead of a shadow like intended. 

But we found the shadow was very effective in which Elli’s character Nina cast a harsh shadow on Bethany which gave the illusion that she was being swallowed up and overpowered. Though we mainly based the preliminary on the Coen Brothers I found that the shadow casted here reminded me of Film Noirs.

In a few ways we found that certain parts of our preliminary things were ineffective. The main one was where we broke the 180 degree rule and as a result it wasn’t very smooth as there is too dramatic a lurch from one side to another.

In the same scene that we broke the 180 degree rule there was also a massive contingency error in which the desk appears to completely disappear. This was partly a result of the setting in which we used which we found too cramped to effectively film.

Due to the amount of filming we did we had to cut out a lot of the scenes that we filmed, most of the clips that we removed involved the dialogue. Because of this we found that may of clips cut off too sharply – the mostly due to having to cut off part way through dialogue without picking up any further lines. This effected the result overall because much of the scenes with Dialogue weren’t smooth. On the other hand we also had to cut down and speed up many of the establishing and panning shots and there was no real effect on them at all.

From these mistakes we know of a few ways in which we can improve our final task. We need to make sure we don’t break the 180 degree rule again; we can do this by keeping note of where we had filmed prior to each clip. 

We will also need to choose the setting more wisely, perhaps in a larger room or outdoors due to the unease that we felt while filming to get the camera into the correct angle which would be effective in the long term.
We will also have to plan the dialogue more accurately as this had a large effect on how long the preliminary was, especially since even though we cut down a lot of our clips we were still over the given timeframe.  Something which may have also affected this was the complexity of the storyline we were trying to squeeze in, so we should try and keep the storyline as uncomplicated as possible."

By Rebecca Gatfield