Question 7: Preliminary task

The preliminary task has helped me with planning and making my thriller opening, as I learnt how to create something that would flow through a variety of different techniques. The first technique we used was the match on action shot which tracked the character going someone by showing certain clips that allow the audience to make the assumption they have continued in that direction.

This is the first part of the character that the audience see in our preliminary task, as she is walking up the stairs we don’t want to watch the whole journey so we then skip to the next piece of action, so the audience infer that she has travelled around the corner.

This image shows the continuous movement which is called a match on action shot. This helped us in our actual making of our thriller opening because in our opening we are tracking the disappearance of this young girl and we don’t want to show all of this so we use this continuous movement to get from A to B and that it done through this technique.

The second technique used in this preliminary task is shot reverse shot. This is showing a conversation between two people, it shows the beginning of the conversation from the first characters perspective then flips to the other. This is too make it look realistic however if it isn’t done correctly meaning that the eye line’s don’t match up then the shot reverse shot is incorrect.

This is a still image from our thriller we used an over the shoulder shot to show the shot reverse shot. This is showing it from the characters perspective who isn’t speaking and to show that they are in a two way conversation. In our actually thriller opening we don’t have a shot reverse shot because there isn’t any dialogue.

This is then showing it from the others characters perspective which demonstrates them having a conversation with each other.

The last technique used was the 180 degree rule which is making sure you stay on the same line this is shown in football when it is all shot from the same side of the pitch. This is to make sure the audience don’t get confuse and know who is having the conversation. This is shown through our shot reverse shot as it is shot from the right side of both characters. The 180 degree rule is used in our thriller as the girl is only shot from the right side of the line she is on, this is to make sure that there is no confusion between the characters.

Overall the preliminary task has helped me develop my ideas and use them to make the opening to my thriller because I have used these techniques and developed them to use them in the opening. However it did become more difficult using these techniques as we only have one main character used throughout the play.