Problems we needed to improve and how we overcame them.

Our negative feedback was-

Lack of camera angles- We only really had 4 different camera shots, one of the police officer entering the interregation room, one over the shoulder shot from barneys view, one over the shoulder shot from mr goulds view then one close up shot of barneys face. We realised that it would of been so much of an improvement if we maybe added point of view shots of the photographs of victims and a cctv high angle shot of the room.

Framing- We realised last minute that we could of cropped down the shot to focus more on the actors then the surroundings as we had shelves sticking out alot of the plain wall which we did not need.

Cutting- When we watched the clip in front of the class we realised alot of errors with the cutting as some parts did not flow nicely. This is something we definetly need to make sure is improved on for next time.

Costume on Barney- Some of the feedback was commenting on how Barney had alot of coloured wristbands that did not look right for his part of a murderer.

No flashback- Orignally, the plot was that Barney had a flashback of getting bullied when there is a close up of his face, but we did not have time to fit this in. It would have made it so much exciting but it still worked well.

So, next time we are going to ensure that all camera angles are used and we make more accurate cutting for the main task.

What we succeeded in

From general class feedback and our groups point of view, the parts we succeeded in were-

Actors- Thankfully we had brilliant actors who have had experience in acting and made the atmosphere very suspense. If we did not have these actors, we probably wouldn't have succeeded as well.

Script- We throughly thought through the plot and made the script as realistic as we could to a police interregation interview.

Props- For our props we had exactly what we needed-a tape recorder, a telephone, a folder, evidence, photographs, small table and chairs.

Music- We knew that an interregation room would be quite suspense so we decided not to add music (which worked very effectively) but for the beginning section of mr gould walking into the interregation room we added a delicate piano tune from garage band with police sirens in the background to add a bit of tension to the atmosphere and then once the police officer entered the interregation room the door slammed the music stopped.

Preliminary Exercise

This is our Preliminary Exercise. We feel that it went successful in the end after alot of organisation. We suceeded in many parts but obviously found out we needed improvements. We got feedback from the rest of our class and the negative feedback helped us understand what to improve next time, which will be the main task. It took us approxmatly four hours to shoot and organise.

Production of Preliminary Exercise

For the production of our preliminary exercise we brainstormed some ideas of what would make a good thriller. As a group, We came up with 8 different story boards and decided on which ones we liked best to link with our main project. We explored Themes, Locations, sub-genres, Characters and plots.

Eventually we came up with an idea of a murderer when he was student and was being badly bullied and came to see his teacher to complain about him being bullied. This idea was meant to fit in with our main project of being a flashback. We then started to think of location- we wanted to look at a classroom which looks quite old fashioned (something in the 90s) and which isn't too small or too big. In our school we have porta cabin classrooms which was perfect to work in and around as it looked typically boring and dull. After that, we took some photographs of different camera angles in the classroom and out the class room e.g. High angle shots, tracking shots etc...

We then had to sort out our actors, so we decided to use our friend from college, Barney Smith to be the murderer as he is very good at acting and has been on several stage performances and also does A level Drama.

We also used Mr gould as the teacher. Then our two friends Kerry Jones and Sam Cheasley as the bullies.

As further development progressed, we felt that the plot line didn't have any thriller aspects in it and wasn't very catchy or gripping as we hoped it could be. We thought that if we added some tension and suspense, it won't only look good but would also help us towards the main project and would also be easier to script convincingly. So, we decided to change the plot line to be in a interrogation room where the murderer in present day is being questioned by a police officer about past murders of several of his ex school friends who were actually bullies. The murderer will then have about a 10 second flashback of back in the days of when he got bullied by the school kids.
By doing this plot line instead of the other one will make it more interesting and add some suspense to the plot. It also relates to our main task idea and fits better with the preliminary brief.

From changing the idea, we had to start planning out our locations, actors, scripts and props again. We thought carefully of where our location should be and we found a little office in our school which is the perfect size of an interrogation room. It also looked very convincing as it was quite small and plain.

This a copy of our script we gave to our actors to learn but they improvised most of it very well.

We also sorted out a shooting timeline of what days and times we are shooting, which actors, props and location. It worked out very well apart from some days the actors could not make it last minute and one of the days of shooting was at a lunch break which was half an hour so in the end we did not have enough time and had to cancel.

In the end, we did not have enough time to add the flashback bullying scene and thought it wasn't that neccesary. So, we did not use Kerry Jones and Sam Cheasley as our bullies in the end.