The main things I have learned are:
· Always carefully plan everything to the last detail as being organised saves a lot of time and allows you more time to experiment and re-film things if you need to. It is good to have schedule before you start to film so everyone is clear what you’re planning to get done that day; storyboards are an extremely useful tool for this – our storyboard this time was far more detailed and this helped no end.
· Film as many shots as is possible for each one as there are always things that can unexpectedly be wrong that you haven’t noticed, and it’s good to change the angle and shot size frequently just in case there is one which looks much better.
· In your complete film, the more interesting the shots the better it is to watch (to a certain extent) so I’ve learnt to be more creative when framing and composing shots. (My favourite 3 shots are here:
because they are inventive and add an eerie atmosphere).
· Music can add a lot of effect. We didn’t use it in our preliminary exercise, as the dialogue was very important and as it was set in a police station there wouldn’t have been any diegetic music; however, an underscore appropriate to the atmosphere could have worked very well. I have learned to always try music (particularly at key moments), but to be careful not to get too carried away with it.
· Lighting is something our group has had the most problems with. As both our exercises needed to be filmed in the darkness it was difficult to strike a balance between making the action visible and in-focus, and making it clear it’s nighttime. I think this has improved since our first exercise enormously as our shots are a lot clearer, but this is one of the things we could still get better at.
· Our continuity editing, according to our classmates, has always been a strong point. Though still this has improved through practise and particularly as we didn’t film everything in our thriller opening on the same day – we learned to have to make everything look exactly the same as previously. There is quite a lot more match-on-action in this product that our last as it’s longer and we decided to include a wider variety of shot sizes and angles, making the match-on-actions more interesting. As there is no character interaction, the 180 degree rule did not come into our opening very much; however, we were careful not to film the same character from 2 different sides in a row so as not to cause confusion. There is a sequence in the middle of our opening which uses parallel editing which we didn’t get a chance to use before. This was fun to put together and increased the tension very well as the man is still in the house and the girl starts to walk up the drive; this is another thing we have progressed to since the preliminary exercise.The final thing that I personally have learnt is to keep things simple. It is easy to get carried away with plotlines and messages you want to communicate and over-complicate things (often making them difficult to follow, meaning the audience loose interest). I have learned not to labour too much over the editing, and it is always best to ask the opinion of others as you can often get too caught up in your own work to notice little things that are out of place.
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