Preliminary task reflection

Camera framing, Composition and movement...
- While filming, we always thought about where abouts the camera was in relation to what we were filming. For instance, at the beginning we always focused the camera on the feet of Ashley so that the audience got a sense of confusion and suspense. We then moved the camera up to the hand to show the parcel which revealed a bit more about the person and then we cut from there to the office where everything was revealed and you could see Ashley's face.

Sound...
- We used a song called New Born by Muse to create a sense of tension. We used this song throughout the whole of the short film so that people could get the sense that something strange was happening. This was non-diegectic sound because we added it in afterwards. We also used a phone ringing as non-diegetic sound and i that was all we did as non-diegetic. All the rest was diegetic such as the dialogue and the door opening.

Mise en scene...
- We made sure that Ashley wore the same clothes for modern day and the same clothes for the flashbacks. This makes the audience understand what is what. We also made sure i wore the same clothes for the receptionist and i wore glasses to make myself look more like a receptionist. We also used the props in the appropriate way and made sure that the parcel was in it at the correct time.

Editing...
- This was the area that we made the audience know it was a psychological thriller. We added in the music at the editing stage which was the most important thing that showed the genre. Also the border around the edge on all the dream shots had a massive effect on what the audience would think.

2 things i think went well on this task and that i would bring forward to my main task would be the flashbacks that we did and how we edited it, this is because it gave a really good effect and makes the genre stand out a lot more. The other thing would be the sound that we incorporated into it at the end, this is because it also created the sense of the genre and without the music it wouldn't have been anywhere near as good.

2 things i think i would avoid doing in my main task is not shooting the shots enough times so that we had backups if some weren't right. We need to shoot enough shots because then we have lots of different shots to choose from if something goes wrong. The other thing would be looking out for mistakes when we shoot the film so that we don't have shadows for example in our film. This is because no matter how many times we shoot the scene, it would still have the shadow in it and so we would have to go back out and shoot the same scene over and over again which wastes time.

Post production (Editing)

Before we did any editing we got to grips with Final Cut Pro and learnt the basics of how to use it. We then imported our footage onto the Mac's and the first thing we did was rename all of our clips so that we knew what was what. This helped a lot, further on in the editing process. This took almost all of the lesson to do because we had about 50 clips to rename. On the second day we started to put our clips together just to work out the order of how it went. As we did this, we did also try out some effects to see how they looked. In our main task we won't do this because we will put it all together before adding in any effects.

After putting it all in order we sorted out the flashbacks and cut the clips up and chopped and changed them so they looked like the feet were going up the stairs at the same time in the modern day and the flashback. As we did this we also put in the effect "Bad Film". This made it look more black and white and also put an edge on it that made it stand out as being a flashback.

After the editing of putting all the clips together we thought that we would need a particular blurriness or a border throughout the dream so that you could tell it was a dream. For this we put a black faded border all around the shots apart from the bed shot which wasn't a dream. We thought it would have been better in white but we couldn't change it to white so we left it as it wasn't that important.

We had to keep the 'match on action' up to scratch the whole way through so we had to check that it was edited very precisely to make sure there were no mistakes in this area. After all of this was done we added in the music to create an atmosphere. For this we chose the song 'New Born' by Muse. It was an edgy song so we thought it went with the genre psychological thriller. Finally, we added in a bit at the end that said 'To be continued...' which made it more of a cliff hanger and more like our genre.