Skills Development

Last year in my AS studies i produced a film opening of a horror genre, this tested my skills and made me think about my analytical skills to produce the best results.

Pre-Production
pre-production was a very important part of my practical production. To start my research i looked into a few films of the same genre to get an idea of what opening of films where like, this gave me a idea of what techniques and concepts and how to apply them. My next step to carry out my research was a questionnaire this consisted of in depth questions to figure out who my target audience is and what they really look for when watching a film, our questionnaire was a basic overview and was not as in depth as we would have liked, if i was to carry out the questionnaire again in my second year i will think more about the questions i ask and look at the genre as more of idea and ask how people portray the genre and how they would like to see a film produced.

After the questionnaire we wrote a film proposal so we had a clear understanding of what we where expecting from ourselves and our film opening, the main aim of our proposal to the outline exactly what we had to do i think we successfully did this but we did only "outline" the main points we could have given ourselves an easier job if we where more specific this way we would have the exact shot types, music, settings, character, techniques ect. but our opening was very loosely held together and was made on spur of the moment thoughts and places which where not idea but where 'plan b material'. Our location pictures and story-board where a great help to our production stage, i had never produced a storyboard before but even though my drawings where stickmen we still had an idea of what shots to use and establish how they would work and possibly not work. The location pictures help us establish where our shots would take place and made it easier for us to take into account the 180 and 30 degree rule so the film when edited fits together well and seamlessly.

Production

To establish our shots and camera angles and to test if our film would edit well together we produced a test film of all of our shots exactly how we would produce the main film following the storyboard, once we edited the opening together we noticed that some of the shots did not work so this was an opportunity to analyse each shot type and re think about what shots would collaborate together.