Preliminary Film

As a second filming task, we had to film and edit a preliminary film. We had to film someone walking into a room and having a short dialogue with another character. As our first filming wasn’t interesting and didn’t have enough elements of suspense in it, we decided to make a strong narrative which meant that it would be easier create suspense as we knew what we were doing clearly.
The second practice of filming went very well, we were given two hours to film and we finished filming early. At first, I found it hard to put our piece together whilst filming, but we came together as a group. We knew we had to film the different bits of the piece several times to get the best shots, we decided to film things over 3 times so that when it came to editing we could make the final film perfect.
Between the first filming task and this filming task I have learnt a lot, such as not filming in order, match cutting and filming each clip more then once. You can clearly see this in our final produce of the film, as this time it does not look amateur. There are strong filming conventions and a wide range of camera shots unlike the first filming we did.
I think we used strong conventions of thriller films as the camera shots were very sharp and snappy which built up a lot of suspense. We used many different camera shots for example over the shoulder shots, looking at the other character from different points of view, not filming the whole body. Because we used a range of different shot types, it created anticipation within the scene and made the pace of it fast so it was not boring at any point. The lighting in the scene was naturalistic, which did not really create suspense but kept it natural. The mise en scene followed usual thriller films. Our piece was about a girl locked away and tied up in a room that was messy, this helped create suspense and build up the tension in the audience. This was very unlike our first attempt at filming! The narrative was strong so it was clear what the two characters were doing and created a strong storyline, which could possibly be an idea for our final filming piece.
This practice film portrays women as strong and dominant which goes against usual stereotypes of women. Usually the men have the power in the scene but this time it was different, this made our film interesting as this went against usual conventions of real film. In addition, it would have been better if it was a male tied up, as it would have really created the sense of women being more dominant. Our practice film also has a strong element of status as you could clearly tell who was in charge.
I feel that this filming task went very well, the end produce was very strong unlike our first weak attempt at filming before hand. We also worked very well as a group, as we got straight into filming which meant we finished quickly and was able to start editing sooner then we thought. One thing I personally found hard was the dialogue, as I found it hard to stay in role and not bursting into laughter, but this is not very relevant, as we do not have to use dialogue in our final thriller piece.