Prelim Task 2

In the second prelim task, we were told to edit what we filmed in the first prelim task. We got onto adobe premier, went into the rushes folder and started straight away. We decided to start with a long shot to establish the setting and get a feel for what the whole character looks like as we decided for her to be the character that the audience would side with, this was character A. We then went onto a mid shot of character B who walks through the door and goes up to character A and tells her to 'do it' the scene mainly consists of that, however, we kept shot duration longer on character A, her having more screen time shows the audience that that is who they should have sympathy for as more time on screen means that they are more important.

While editing we were told that we weren't cutting with meaning, we were cutting into clips that looked 'cool' this means that the clips we were cutting to didn't have reason or meaning behind them. To insure this doesn't happen, I will watch all the clips over and decide based on movement and on how powerful the character is which scene will go where, so if it was a scene where a character is feeling weak, instead of using a mid shot, I will use a high-angle mid shot to show this weakness through camera positioning as well as dialogue. During editing we didn't follow the golden rule of always save and the computer crashed, this caused our nearly finished edit to be lost forever. The computer crash however was a wake up call for our group and having to start again so we all learnt that saving was a very important rule and we will all remember to save in the future.

When looking through the footage, I realise that we should have got the actors to learn the script beforehand as when editing, they would always look at the script and we didn't want it to be shown in the edit so we cut it in a way that it looks like they're not looking at the script, however, this led to the problem that when we were cutting, it didn't have meaning, this was because we were trying so hard to get it to look like they weren't looking at the script pinned up on the wall. When looking through the footage, I wish we did more shots and didn't have to rush the filming as in some of the shots the actors would start laughing so sometimes in the footage we would have to cut the scenes too quickly so that the audience wouldn't see them laughing.

Our group did two different edits, in one we wanted the audience to sympathise with character A and in the other we wanted them to sympathise with character B. We used the same shots for each and wanted to see how editing affected the audience so by using the same clips but different lengths we were able to create a second scene where character B was the one that the audience sympathised with, we did this through different shot durations, so if a scene holds a character on screen longer than the other, the one that has the most screen time feels more important to the audience.

In the thriller, It will most likely follow the genre conventions of being fast paced, this means that I will have to make short and fast cuts, whereas in the prelim task, it is a scene of dialogue this means that it is slow paced even though the scene is about something bad, it isn't intense enough to be fast paced as nothing happening within the frame is intense enough.

I will approach my thriller differently due to the prelim tasks, the camera work is what I learnt most about through the prelim tasks as usually I would follow the shot list shown on the storyboard where as now, I will shoot the full scene in one camera angle and film the scene again with another camera angle, this means if you want to use the angle at a different point in the scene you are able to as the entire scene has been filmed from the angle. The thriller in terms of editing however will be a lot more difficult, will be longer than the prelim and also harder to edit as we need to incorporate music into the scene which will make the complications even worse but after the prelim tasks I think us as a group are prepared to do it.