Since my preliminary one thing that has improved is the use of camera angles. These can be used to develop characters just by looking at them instead of what they say or do, a very good way to introduce a character straight away in the first few shots. In the preliminary two detectives are talking about a case they need to get to, all the shots apart from extreme close ups have level angles, this in no way shows how powerful the characters are or who is in charge. However in our thriller this is vastly improved on as the third shot of our main protagonist shows him being looked down on by using a high angle. This shows that he is vulnerable and weak, we instantly know that he is the victim. Another way we have used camera angles is in the flash forwards, they have a distorting tilt that contrasts the lack of tilt in the rest of the thriller, showing that it is an abnormal place.
Sound is something that is very over looked, I now realise how important it is after adding sound effects and changing sound levels. In our preliminary task we made little or no changes to the sound levels and added no sound effects at all. This was worked upon in our thriller to a great level of detail, we added extra sound effects to make certain scenes have a greater affect on the viewer while making our film look more professional, and changed the levels in certain areas so that the soundtrack is smoother throughout the film. For example in our thriller we have a rolling wind sound going over the initial bit until our characters appear, at that point the wind quietens down over a few seconds to blend into the background sound the actual clip that is on screen. In our preliminary nothing was done to blend the sounds together and this makes it sound almost jumpy and it makes the viewer feel less immersed. We also decided to not to have any music in our thriller, the periods of silence with only a hint of wind in the background suit our thriller far more than having some creepy music, this is like blair witch project where the lack of music makes it seem more real.
The use of titles and their placement on the screen has become so much more important since our preliminary task. With our preliminary we didn't have titles in the first place, but now we use them I see the importance of them, the font, placement and how many. The font represents the mood or genre of the film, the titles for Se7en wouldn't suit a film like Toy Story, it is key to introducing the viewer to what they are watching before they understand what the title represents. The positioning of the title is also important, not so much in the way of telling the viewer what sort of film they're watching or to follow a genres conventions but as a way of cleverly using space on the screen to position your title into like we did. For our thriller we only put two titles in, one to show the name of our film and the other for the production company, we thought that having too many titles would ruin the creepiness of the film, this
similar to films like Paranormal activity that dont use titles at all to make it seem more realistic.
I have also learnt the importance of time management, in our preliminary we had about 40 minutes to shoot everything and I think this shows in the final product, where as our thriller was filmed over a period of two days, giving higher quality shots and an overall better finish. The same goes for the editing process, for our preliminary we edited over a couple of days, our thriller was edited for weeks and had a rough cut that we got feedback on. Just by spending more time on it the difference in the professionalism of the two films is clear to see.
No comments:
Post a Comment