Arnold Baker

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 I have learnt that angles mean a lot when catching the audiences eyes and when they spot mistakes. I noticed a shot in the preliminary that made me look very small compared to the person I was in shot with as it was an over the shoulder high angle shot.

A shot from my preliminary task A shot from my main task

In my main task I made sure to film each shot more than once to get the right angle and get the best effect on screen. I have also learnt that quick, rapid cuts were more suited to my genre of film opening. Also in my preliminary we didnt have a strong narrative or story to follow, when looking at this compared to my final product the narrative of the product has improved. We thought about a story and characters we could add, this was one of our first tasks that really helped improve our narrative. As it is a neo noir Thriller we wanted to have it quite slow while also having some rapid cuts added in to separate the tension and start adding in some action giving some good sensory pleasures. Also the lighting in my preliminary was not very well planned, there was not enough natural light and also we did not edit the lighting too much in the preliminary. In our main task the lighting was a big deal for us. After doing some research I saw that lighting was crucial for neo noir. Knowing this I wanted to make sure every shot had similar lighting. Having dark but also making it look old with a lot of shadows (chiaroscuro lighting).

A shot from our main task A shot taken from Se7en

We have a close up of the victims neck being tied up with a noose. When filming the shot we made sure to keep the light behind the victim, this was to make his face dark and quite hard to see detail in his face. We thought this was not enough and during our editing process we added a vignette to the shot to make the scene even darker than it was naturally. This put more focus onto the victim, making the scene look more sinister.