Ben & Alex's Preliminary Task Log

Preliminary Task Log

Pre-Production

The pre-production side of the preliminary task is what happened before we made it. An example of this would be the storyboarding of the prelim which we had to do twice because we lost the original storyboard which was nearly complete.

The storyboard we did first of all was not the same as the one we did the second time round but Alex & I decided that the second one was better anyway so we weren’t feeling too bad about losing the first one. To be honest, the video isn’t exactly the same as what the storyboard illustrated but overall we think that the video is still good. The pre-production process was quite tricky because we had to think amongst ourselves what would make a good prelim and things that differ from the video itself and the storyboard are;

·         The stair scene (lost on camera)

·         The ‘rage’ scene (unscheduled improvisation that made the clip better)

·         The pupils from the class we filmed in coming back to the class during filming (you can see them at the door at the end)

The scene at the end which was completely unplanned was a necessity because without it we would have had no ending because that was our last chance to shoot and ending as the camera had less than 1 minute of battery life remaining. If we had obeyed our storyboard our preliminary task would have failed because it would not have had a climatic ending whereas the one that Alex & I actually filmed has an ending that makes people laugh.

In the first week of the clip being on youtube it got over 200 views, showing that something must appeal to people as the other prelim in our group got nearly 40, maybe the rage scene appealed to people when looking around on youtube.

Our preliminary task was originally going to consist of a character walking down some stairs with a match-on-action shot from behind the stairs illustrating and putting an emphasis on the character. This is what went missing on the camera and we had to improvise in the editing room with how to start the clip because all we had to start it with was the main character walking off of the bottom stair.

Overall I think that the preliminary task fulfilled its purpose because although it wasn’t as good as it was meant to be, it has given us an idea of what not to do for our main thriller project.

By Ben Marshall