Looking back at your preliminary, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the main task?

Preliminary Task> Planning - With our Preliminary task we did not complete any planning before the filming process, with

this task we were told what actions were supposed to be shown within the product and it was then down to us to find a suitable location to complete the task of walking up the stairs, opening a door to then have a conversation.

> Working in a group - We were put into groups by the teacher for our Preliminary, these groups were people we did not know.

> Demonstrating match on action - Previous to the task, it was explained to us that we must make the action match and we were shown examples of this.

> Shot reverse shot - Some of us were unfamiliar of what this was however we were shown an example and it was explained to us.

> 180-degree rule - again, we were unfamiliar of this so it was explained however during the filming of our preliminary, I was still slightly confused as to how this would work.

> Using sound - After filming and editing our Preliminary task, we did not spend much time on which music should be used, for example, I picked the first one I felt would fit rather than looking thoroughly for a good music.

> Looking back, the Preliminary task was very rushed and we did not spend very much time going through it at all, this informed my film opening because I knew that to get a better product, we must spend more time on deciding important elements such as location, titles and music. Therefore we spent a long time on research and planning for our film opening and in my opinion this was very beneficial as we have followed conventions well.

The opening for a Horror film - Planning> For our film opening we spent a very long time researching aspects of

existing horror films such as location, sound and mise-en-scène conventions. This meant we had to carry out extensive research into what we wanted to use in our film opening.

> We created a location scouting sheet to help us decide on a location and from this we decided to use Pelhurst on Sawbridgeworth Road as the location for the house scene of the film opening and then the Prisoner of War Camp located in Hatfield Heath.

> We also looked into the conventions of horror films to decide on aspects such as costume, makeup, lighting, sound and titles.

Generic Narative Sequence

> We were able to create a generic narative sequence due to our research and planning. We evaluated existing horror films by doing both a codal analysis and timed analysis of three horror films, this meant that we could tell what was typical of a horror film opening and I also did some research into the story line of horror films.

> We then created a Prezi in our chosen groups with several horror film ideas and presented them to the class. This helped us to create a generic narative sequence because it meant that we had gained audience feedback and the audience also gave suggestions on how these could be improved. This also meant we were learning what people wanted to see in a horror film.

Casting Actors> The process of casting our actor for our film opening was also very

different to when we created our Preliminary task.

> With the Preliminary we used the group we were in as our actors however with our film opening, a lot of planning went into who we wanted to use as our actor, for example, we knew we wanted a teenage girl, we also wanted her to look very vulnerable and innocent as this would fit with our story line.

> We found a very suitable actor and filmed all of the sequence from within the house and then our actor dropped out meaning we had to find another. This was challenging as we were very happy with the image our first actor had however after finding a second actor and filming the entire film opening, we were happy about this as we felt that our actor was very good in the position.

Appropriate Soundtrack

> To find an appropraite soundtrack, we looked at a variety of horror film openings and decided which type we felt would fit into our opening, we then went onto YouTube and also Incompetech and looked for similar music to that which we felt would fit with our opening. We then found an appropriate one on Incompetech meaning it was not copyrighted and was available for use.

Editing > When editing our preliminary task, we used iMovie, this is a very

amateur software compared to PremierPro and meant that our product from the preliminary was not as smooth or closely edited as our film opening.

> When editing our film opening, we used PremierPro, this meant that our product was of a very high standard and also meant that we could edit quite extensively. Due to being such a good editing software, our final product is of a very high quality. Although we were not very familiar with the software to begin with and it took some explaining before I felt comfortable using it, I now know the basics meaning I could easily use it further.

iMovie

PremierPro

Titles> With our Preliminary task we did not spend much time thinking of

our titles and we just entered classmates names into the positions which made the whole process very quick and easy to do.

> Whereas for the film opening we spent a long time looking into existing titles, fonts and then adding appropriate names such as the music producer being under the titles for music. We had to look at many existing horror films for our title ideas and I think this was effective as I feel that ours fit very well into the genre of our film.

Sound

> With the sound for our preliminary task we did not spend any time at all picking one out, I know personally that I picked the first music I felt would fit in at all and we also did not record the conversation on an external recording device, we used the sound from the camera which is not very clear.

> With the music for our film opening however we spent a long time finding an appropriate soundtrack. We watched existing horror film openings and listened for the different types of sound tracks, decided which we thought would be appropriate to use for our film opening and then looked on Incompetech and found one we felt was very effective for our opening. We also chose not to include much diologue or diegetic sound as we felt that the microphone on our cameras was not of a very good quality and we did not feel that we could lipsync our speach whilst making it look natural.

Lighting

> For our preliminary task we did not think about the lighting whilst filming, this means that we just used the lights from our location however this meant that the lighting in our preliminary was not very good for the task.

> For our film opening however we took into account what lighting would fit into our genre conventions, for example with the bathroom scene, we decided to use a particular bathroom in the house as we felt that it had very harsh lighting which would fit into conventions. We also decided to only use lamps in the bedroom scenes as we felt this was darker and fit into conventions slightly better than if we were to have the bedroom lighting on.