Over the past several months of taking Media Studies as an AS level, I have learn’t about a lot of different things from camera angles, shots and intertextuality, to film editing techniques and skills.
Back in September of 2011, I carried out a preliminary task, from which I feel I have gained may skills from. I was in a group with Austen Nuttall, Jessica Moy, and Mandy Edmondson, something of which I wasn’t aware I had to do before I started the course. At first, I was slightly apprehensive about working in a group, however, I feel that in the long run, this has greatly improved my social skills and my ability to work as a team. Throughout the preliminary task, I learnt about the basic five types of camera shot - extreme close up, close up, medium shot, long shot, and extreme long shot - these seemed very difficult for me to get my head round at the beginning, however, now, it’s basic media knowledge. I also learnt three types of shots used in the film making business:
Shot reverse shot - the camera cuts from one shot to another shot to show one character looking at another character, and then back to the first character. The creates a sense of opposition and that the two (or more) character are facing one another.
180 degree rule - two or more characters, or even possible objects or elements, in the same scene should always have the same left to right relationship with one another. A basic explanation of this is the imaginary line - if the camera passes over that line, the audience will see the shot from a different perspective, thus possibly confusing or disorientating them.
Match on action - the camera cuts from one shot to another shot that matches the pace and/or action of the previous shot so as to create a sense of continuity.
During the filming of our preliminary task, we took about an hour’s worth of film because of shots which went wrong or we didn’t want to include. Before this, I was unaware of just how much film needed to be recorded before we could get an ‘appropriate’ shot to use. Further, and after one days worth of filming, we came in the next day in a completely different costume, something of which we didn’t think through - this caused us to re-shoot the entire film again because there would be a continuity problem if we didn’t - this would have confused the audience if there would have been a change in costume.
After filming the preliminary task, I realised just how important research and planning was into the thriller genre, and the importance of mise-en-scene has taught me a lot about the construction of films. I then moved on to the actual opening to a thriller film production for which I was in a group with Austen Nuttall, not so much a bad thing because we both attended the same high school and knew each other reasonably well.
Research and planning has both been a very different experience for me - the research side of things was a challenge because of the sub-genres aside of the thriller genre itself. One thing of which is sometimes confusing to me is the difference between the thriller genre and horror genre because of their similar characteristics - thriller and horror films alike display a suspenseful atmosphere. One film which still baffles me slightly is “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) because of it’s thriller and horror elements. It displays generic conventions of a thriller film due to the suspense and claustrophobic mise-en-scene, but also, to me, represents parts of a horror film due to the gory scenes.
Planning has been more of an eventful journey than research because of the use of different technologies - before I started my AS Media Studies course, I would use word processing as the main form of planning in anything I do, however, over the past months, I have shown my ability to use PowerPoints and embedding YouTube clips to my blog.
Austen and I originally decided on the use of a shipping container in which our victim gets trapped in. This dark mise-en-scene really represents generic conventions of a thriller film and the victim would be shown as a dark silhouette, similarly like the shadow of Harry Lime entering the sewer in the scene from “The Third Man” (1949).
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