Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt from it to the full product?

We believe that there is a number of areas in which we have progressed in in terms of ability from the preliminary task to the full product. One area that Alex have learnt about is improving his performance on-camera during the full task. During even a relatively basic task such as the preliminary he was evidently nervous and perhaps originally slightly uncomfortable about being on camera and had to get out of bad original habits such as talking into the camera as opposed to other characters and not timing the start of my lines correctly. He believe that during the full task, having gained a small level of experience of how to perform on camera, he was much more confident and was completing harder on-camera tasks in fewer takes.

My skills and knowledge of the camera has also improved, in my opinion, I have hugely progressed between the preliminary task and the full product. I wasn't the main camera man but what I did take part in was suggesting new shot ideas and showing Alex how to use it, this meant that I had to learn how to use the camera and the tripods.

Also all our editing skills on the Apple Macs have all improved as we all did our fair share of editing both preliminary and final short film. Using the software (final cut pro) was definately very challenging as none of us are used to using a Mac computer. We all use the popular and cheaper alternative in our daily life- windows software therefore when it came to editing our preliminary, we found that this was a hard hurdle to jump over. Especially when we were doing our first short film which was 'disappearance', we found that it is very hard to make the shots flow. But we learnt from our mistakes and kept the idea simple but effective for our final video.We definately noticed a massive difference when it came to editing. Our final product was 100% better than our preliminary due to learning from the mistakes and doing extra research on how to do different effects with the software.

I have also improved on and learnt a lot about the importance of working well as a group on a project such as this. During a small task like the preliminary this wasn’t so evidently needed but it was still vital that we worked well as a group as we had to get it right both on and off camera as well as when it came to the editing stage of the task. We felt that we did work well as a group as we are all friends outside of the media lesson but we thought this would be a disadvantage due to distractions etc. but we felt we have all worked together like clockwork. We each played a role in the blog and a role in the film without any hassle.

With the full task, it was much more important that we worked well as a group and broke up separate tasks and jobs accordingly between members of the group. With regard to planning the film as a group, I have learnt that it is vital to split up planning jobs amongst members of the group with jobs such as the shooting map, writing the storyboards and planning the storyline itself. I have also learnt a great amount about working together during the shoot of the full task. My learning of the timings between starting the camera and commencing the action in the scene, particularly during the killing scene, has definitely improved and it was vital that it did as everybody had to be in the right place at the right time in order for this ambitious scene to work.

The audience feedback, in my opinion, was more positive than I believed it was going to be. They seemed to praise, in particular, the somewhat ambitious cctv and killing scene that was pivotal to the film’s success. I believe that the audience were able to identify well with the characters and the film’s storyline and were able to understand the overall intentions of the film.

There were definitely certain strengths and certain weaknesses to our production. I think one strength that was recognised by a number of people was the variety of different shot types that it incorporated. These shots ranged from the long shots in the time lapse scene to the high angle shots of cctv scene at the start of the film to the tense over-the-shoulder shot of the of the child seeing the murder at the end of the film opening. In addition to this, we believe that the actual storyline of the film, a cross between the 'Friday the 13th' and 'The Strangers' helped it quite dramatically in receiving praise. In terms of weaknesses to the film, there were some small errors that we picked up on during the edit such as background noise during the shoot at our location, as well as impurities at times during the non-diagetic sound.

Finally, I believe that the most important thing I have learnt about film-making during this process is that you do need to have patience, especially during more ambitious scenes and that you will never get every single shot right in the first couple of takes.