Pre-Production is the part of the making process where you plan out what you're going to do before you actually go and do it. By doing this you save yourself a lot of time and ultimately a lot of money because you wouldn't be wasting time deciding what to do. Before we started the project we couldn't see the point of this part but since then we have really learnt the importance of Pre-Production. As you can see most of our Pre-Production happened in December.
Planning:
From the beginning of our preliminary task we were told that planning was essential to making a successful product and so we took the advice and began to plan parts before hand. However things that we didn't plan for became apparent when we got to the post production stage as we found it hard to edit. We have since learnt that we have to plan every small detail. Each shot should be taken 2-3 times just to be on the safe side. When planning the shots we should take into consideration:- the proxemic of characters and props, the length of the shot, the lighting, the costume needed, which characters are needed, what type of edit will be following the shot and many more factors. Since we now know to prepare for everything this is what we have tried to do.
Team Work:
Team work is one of the key element to success in any industry but is very important in film production planning. Since we learnt its importance we were all allocated jobs to do to progress through our project quicker that we would have done otherwise. Different jobs such as finding a location, call sheet etc were handed out between us to spread the workload. We also found that if one person concentrates on a specific thing then it was generally of better quality as more time was spent on the task. Once a task had been completed we shared our work with the group to see if anything could be changed to make it the best possible.
Time Management:
Time management is very much a part of team work. In fact it is the cause of team work. Without time management nothing would get done by the deadline or to a reasonable standard and this is why its so important.
Production:
Production is the part of the process where you actually go out and get your footage, sound clips etc. This is the most important part of the process as it is the bare bones of your final project. Without it you would get nowhere.
Camera Work:
In our preliminary task we learnt a lot about the camera, how it works, what type of shots work best, but most importantly, how to use the tripod. The way that we framed some of the shots and the angles we used were directly inspired from the shots that worked well in our preliminary task. For example we showed a girl walking down a hall and we cut to a low angle of her feet walking across the floor, we thought that this was so effective that we incorporated it into our final piece; it's the first shot used of the killer entering the house. In the same way that we found shots that worked we also found shots that didn't work. We found it very difficult to get a very fluent tilt of pan shot because the tripod was too hard to manipulate in that way, we always ended up with shaky shots. You can even see in our final product that the tilt shot of the bookcase we used was very wobbly. If we were to do it again I think this is the first thing we would change about our piece.
Lighting:
It became apparent very early on that lighting played a very key role in making a film. Early on we did test shots to see what kind of quality we got in different lighting environment and unsurprisingly we found that the more light there was the better the quality of the shot; there was only one problem, to create the stereotypical horror movie conventions we needed most of our shots to be dark and gloomy. We overcame this in the editing stage by digitally dimming our shots; by doing it this way the shots looked dark but they were still crisp. Click here to see how we changed the brightness and contrast.
Mise en Scene:
Mise en scene is more than just the props. It is a very necessary technique that brings the world of movie making to life. Without appropriately thought out mise en scene it could turn even the most high budget film into a disaster. We learnt that we needed to make our set look as authentic as possible and so we made it look homely by putting a sofa, mat and table as well as a television to make it look like a typical home. We also had to think about costumes and what connotations they bought with them. See this post for our costume choice.
Post-Production:
Post-Production is the final stage of the film process before distribution and it is where all the magic happens. With the use of computer editing suites that have extensive features it is easy to make a film quickly even without any prior knowledge. See Evaluation Question 6 for an in depth view on the technology used.
Technology:
In post-production we got to know how to use a few different applications and my blog post Evaluation Question 6 explains in detail how we used them. To sum up what we learnt id have to say mainly we had to get used to the layouts of the apps and the different windows within them. The most challenging app to use was Final Cut express because all the features it offered confused us and the easiest app to use by far was iMovie, this is because of its easy to use drag a drop user interface. Apple designed it intentionally so that it could be used by people with even the most basic computer skills.
Time Management:
This was key to getting our project finished on time, we would all take turns editing our movie whilst the other two would always be watching and suggesting things that could be done to improve upon what had been done so that everyones view was taken into account. After we had finished editing we allowed time to go back over and make changes dependent on what our target audience felt was missing. In our preliminary task we didn't take into account our TA after we had made the film and we realised that we could have potentially made a film that wouldn't appeal.
Audience:
This is a very important learning curve for us because if we made something that wasn't going to be watched by our target audience then it wouldn't be watched by anybody. We had to ensure that all of the above was done to near perfection so that we could achieve our desired TA. We learnt that every little detail had to scream horror even the typography and music. The more conventions of the horror genre that we successfully followed the closer we were to gaining our target audience.
