QUESTION 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Since I first edited and filmed the preliminary task I feel that I have gained a vast amount of new knowledge and experience. One feature I believe that I have improved upon is filming. In comparison to my Preliminary task, I feel that my Thriller shows more sophisticated shots and not only better camera angles but also cleaner shots. This has had a large effect on how our thriller will be reviewed and criticised and in luckily, this key problem in the preliminary task was not carried over into the thriller.
The main skill which I have learnt is editing, since the beginning of the course I had some editing knowledge but the majority of the software was new to me and I had little understanding of how to stitch my project together. After the preliminary task I had learnt a lot of the basics for editing, and since then I have refined the skills by repeating the edit and fine tuning every ounce of error that I could see. In my thriller the amount of cross dissolves, dip to blacks and addictive dissolves that I used contrasts well with the lack of dissolves used in my preliminary task. This shows that over the course, I learnt that in order to build suspense I need to make the scenes move faster. In fact, my thriller is half the time of my preliminary task purely because I learnt that my thriller needed to be fast paced.
Another issue was not technical based but instead it was an issue with the group. At many times the clashing opinions would push some people out of the group whilst others would argue the disagreed with the thriller. It seemed impossible to agree. This changed however after we made our first thriller and it was so far from a good grade that we decided to start again. This original failed thriller was in many ways was the the tipping point between not understanding and understanding what is required from my media product. The original thriller lacked a variety of camera angles and this taught us to open our minds to intertextual references and generic conventions that we would need to add into our thriller.
We utilised the snow in early january as a way to start over, we quickly created a story which could create suspense and appeal to our audience. We then filmed every single shot and angle which we knew of. This was key to our thriller because when the snow melted we would need to already have enough shots to complete the thriller. We decided to drag the character of Tiffany through the snow in order to create the suspense we needed for a successful thriller. We learnt a lot from the original thriller, for example costumes became a lot more important in our final thriller because we needed to contrast the dead body with the snow and we could not achieve this effect without including vibrant costumes. We decided to put Tiffany in a red coat so that we could link her to the little girl in "Schindlers list". This intertextual reference was created due to the lack of intertextuality in our first thriller. It seemed that our motives for the second thriller were to do everything that we didn't do in our original thriller. This is what caused us to learn the needed skills in progression from our preliminary product to our final product.

I found out that the use of sound bridges add a lot of effect to the scene and after analysing a few Thrillers I found out that "Once Upon A Time In America" used a phone ringing to create a sound bridge during a murder investigation. We realised that using the sound bridge of Tiffany's phone ringing would add to the importance of the phone call and make the ringing become more and more distressing. I also found my titles with a similar system, I decided that if I was going to use any title at all it would have to already have the font of a successful thriller. I finally decided that the font from the Third Man would be most successful. In comparison to our first thriller or preliminary task which didn't even have titles the Final Thriller Product shows that journey of understanding that we took as a group though out the course.