AS Main Task Critique

Synopsis

For my AS level media main task, my partner Alyx and I wanted to dive into the aspects and conventions of horror films in order to contort pre concieved ideas of the christmas season. Our film focuses on a monster breaking into a families home and looking round the house. Much of this is drawn from slasher horror films such as Halloween, whilst mixing in with supernatural/creature films. 

Area's of success

I Think we achieved the mood we were striving for; focusing on the creature like characteristics of the being we follow. Furthemore, our structure for filming worked well. We decided to do all of our exterior shots during the festive season because decorations would still be out. This meant that we could build up a stock of good film that we could contiunally draw on in order to build up the ideas of the time of year. I feel our use of free hand camera was good too as it links closer to the idea of the creature, and choosing to do a majority of out exposition either through the radio broadcast or through items found inside the house that the monster looks at.

Areas of improvement 

i think one of our primary concerns and areas of improvement was how dark our peice was. Because we didn't understand just how much we could do in post production. And as we wanted our production to be quite dark. To achieve this, rather than using darkening in post, we made our set quite dark too. We used drapes and towels in order to darken our set. However, this means that a majority of our footage was rather dark and had to be brightened. This could have lead to a kind of bleaching effect on some of our clips, aswell as not being able to see much; especially in our ending shot. Aswell as a shoddy segway between a shot taken in a seperate location on a seperate day. These are my main gripes with our production however.

Conclusion

I feel like this task gave us an incredible introduction into film making. We are able to draw from our mistakes and are better informed on the theory done in class such as 180 rule and the rule of thirds. i can comfortably say that i feel way more confident in starting my A2 production after having this this experience.