Q7- Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Looking back at my preliminary task, I feel I have learnt a lot. I believe I have improved on my filming, editing and planning. Before deciding on our final idea for our thriller, we had numerous ideas, but they were too complicated.

We had many influences for our thriller because we have had to analyse many different thrillers. I have learnt to identify generic thriller conventions which have helped me to develop aspects of mise-en-scene in my own thriller, such as, costume, locations, camera angles and lighting. Working with one other person helped to be considerate of others ideas and learn to compromise.

Camera Angles Learnt:

Over Shoulder

Close Up

Point of View/Worms Eye

Tilt shot

Casting actors for our thriller was hard. We had to take into consideration age, appearance and whether they could act or not. We wanted someone young and female which was not very complicated because I am a drama student and the majority of my drama class are females. After choosing Rio to play the homeless girl, we realised that it was going to be even harder to get everyone together at one time. We found it most difficult to choose our older man, in the end we chose my Dad because he lived in Norwich and was willing to act in his spare time. After filming a couple of times we realised that it was going to be harder than it looked, Rio found it hard to get to and from Norwich in her spare time because she was doing A-levels as well, which are very time consuming, so after doing a few shoots with Rio we decided as a group that it would be easier to use ourselves as actors, we considered who was better at filming and who would suite the part, Mandy volunteered herself, which made it easier to get us all together at the same time.

In our preliminary task my editing skills were not as advanced as they are now. For example I have taught myself to use appropriate transition and visual effects to make my edit more elegant. We used slow motion in the shot of the Stalker as he reaches down towards the homeless girl, and then we left it on a cliffhanger to make the audience want to see more.

I have also learnt to choose an appropriate title. It took us a while, we looked at the word 'Homeless' in different languages to make the film look elegant and reach out to a international audience, however we realised that we wanted to appeal to a younger audience. We finally chose, 'Invisible Lives' because it highlighted the amount of homeless people who were not considered to be members of society.

Overall, I have enjoyed making my thriller. I've had my up's as well as downs, which have only made it stronger and more appealing to watch. I've enjoyed the whole experience and discovering new films of the thriller genre. At the start of the course I had only watched a few thrillers, but was not certain what conventions fit into the genre, but now I have learnt key aspects and can recognise the thriller genre.