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

I believe that we have learnt a lot in the way of both editing and storyline. Our preliminary had no real storyline to it but we gave our final idea a good, if confusing and mysterious, story plot that progressed well. From the preliminary task we learnt how o use both the cameras and the Mac’s; playing around with what shots worked best where and how best to stitch them together. This made it so we were better prepared for this when the time came to do our final thing and, although we didn’t do as much as we perhaps could, we did better than we would have done otherwise.

When we planned our production we did it by each of us coming up with an idea and seeing which one we and the rest of the group preferred. In the end we went for a combination of my idea, the flashbacks and someone being attacked, and Duncan’s idea, an apocalyptic wasteland, to create the final idea. The next question was where best to film it. We first decided to film in the fields out the back of my house in Bourne but when Kirsty and I went to scout them out we discovered that there were winter crops in them which would not be good for our idea. This caused us to look elsewhere and Duncan suggested another bit of land about a mile from his house but when the car that was to get us there broke down we had to settle for his house in Pointon. This meant that we had to modify the storyboard somewhat in order to fit in with the new surroundings.

The next problem we encountered was that, due to the unorganised swap of filming place, we didn’t have enough footage to be able to stream it all together perfectly and, because of the snow, we couldn’t go back and re-film. We got around this by putting transitions in between certain clips to make it look like, though it didn’t flow, it wasn’t meant to.

I have learnt that there is a lot of time and effort needed in order to produce a thriller opening and, if I was to do it again, I would make sure I was a lot better organised as I know now that, even when something goes wrong, you can’t just wing it. You need to have a proper storyboard and you need to follow that storyboard. If I was back doing the filming again I would have been pushier with the others to make sure all the footage flowed together and that we had done every shot more than one time rather than just the odd few. This could have been done by actually giving one of us the role of director instead of all of us just trying to compromise and end up getting nowhere.

We would also have done well to have had a proper plan written up for each of us so that we all knew exactly where we were going to meet and what was going to happen rather than having it just in our heads where we were likely to forget it or misinterpret it and that it should have been done at least a couple of days in advance.

My group worked fairly well as a team though some were more motivated than others and more willing to get the job done in their free time. I think this is shown in our project. When coming up with our idea and doing things such as the questionnaire and storyboard, we all took on different roles in order to make it easier on each of us and we all worked together in the filming though Joe and Duncan acted and Kirsty and I filmed. Duncan was very much the director at this point too and I was the main editor.