Evaluation of Prelim

The assigned brief of our prelim was to shoot a short sequence where a character enters a room, sits down at a desk and exchanges a few lines of dialogue with another character. In ours, we tried to make this as suspenseful as possible by focusing on the 'idea of the unknown' by not showing Emily's (who played the character entering the room) face. We did this through a close ups of her feet as she walked and shooting her from behind but not actually revealing to the audience who she was.

 We experimented with this, first by keeping the camera still and having Emily walk towards it, then afterwards putting the camera on a chair and pulling it along.I thought our attempt at this were fairly effective because it created a variety of outcomes, all the while still making Emily's character quite mysterious to the audience which was what we intended. However, the shots of just her body but not her face were not quite as successful because it didn't exaggerate the 'anonymous' feeling that we aimed for. It could have been more effective, possibly, if we focused more on extreme close ups of her instead of revealing her full body (for example, close ups of her hands or part of her clothing.)

For the sound, we tried to choose something eery to go alongside the camera work. I think this worked mostly because it was quite simple and created a creepy or mysterious atmosphere. We used folley sound to emphasize the sound of the slamming door. Although we matched the timing as best as we could, it would have been more effective had we recorded our own slam instead of using a pre-made one because this way the timing would have been more accurate. Towards the end, as Emily and Denise's character finally come face to face, we tried to create suspense by fading out the music and just leaving the sound of a thudding heartbeat. This wasn't too successful, however, as the sound of the heartbeat was too quiet in comparison to the music beforehand and it gives the impression that the music finishes too suddenly.

We tried to keep the credits fairly simple so that it wasn't too much of a distraction to the work. Also, it was difficult to find the positioning of the text where it could remain fairly visable as we used a variety of shots that we kept switching between. Generally, I think our credits could have been improved because there is risk of them being too unnoticeable to the audience either because of the colour we picked (white) or because the font was too small. However, I liked the outcome of our title because we made it flicker and disappear simultaneously with the slam of the door. To improve the title, I think a bolder font would have engaged the audience more.

Overall, I think we did a good job despite there being room for improvement, our experimentation allowed us to learn what was and what wasn't effective both camera, sound and editing wise.