How my production skills developed during this project [EVALUATION Q3]

I have created two top trump cards indicating the improvement in my production skills during this project.

Codes & Conventions - I believe that my knowledge on thriller codes and conventions have improved because I have watched and studied a variety of thriller films during the project, such as: The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), Black Swan (2010, Aronofsky), and many more. I have even studied directors who are well-known for making great thrillers, such as Alfred Hitchcock. I learned the typical film language that not only him, but also many other directors making thriller films use, such as: Lowkey lighting, close up shots, and many more. I also learned about the Roland Barthes Narrative codes which helped me create a story to shoot.

Planning & Organisation - At the start of the project, I did not do enough planning which eventually led me to remove a scene from my film because I did not find the time to shoot it. Although in the end I realised that removing that scene would benefit me (because then it would drastically increase the time of my opening and it would not fit the criteria), the lack of thorough planning preventing me from filming everything that I initially wanted to film. I learnt from this experience and planned the reshoots shoot accordingly with more detail than I had with my previous shoots. 

Camera Work - My camera work was fairly strong at the start of the project, mainly because I did film studies last year, and this year I practiced my camerawork even more with mini-projects like the Jurassic Jelly scene recreation, Interrogation, & Hitchcock Production day. I used equipment that I never used before, such as: Rubber dolly track, Shoulder mount, Gimbal, etc. 

Me using the gimbal on set for the first time - It was malfunctioning at times so I learnt how to replicate some of my desired shots with the tripod I had

Visual effects - I was familiar with basic visual effects such as gunshots and blood splashes, involving green screen editing, but during the project not only did I use a completely new visual effect, colour isolation, but I also tried this new technique out on an editing software that I had never used before: DaVinci Resolve. On the software, I was able to select a specific colour range and highlight only the shades in the range, creating a look where the entire diegetic world is in black and white apart from The Girl's top, where the blue is highlighted.

Editing - My editing was already very strong at the beginning of this project mainly because I have been editing for years, and I have almost always been able to visualise the editing of my films as I shoot them; however, this project gave me the challenge of editing visual and auditory glitches. I found this quite overwhelming at first, but I eventually found methods that can help me by using effects built into one of the editing applications that I have used in this project: Final Cut Pro X 

Creative confidence - I had a clear visual idea in my head, and I had thought about and developed the narrative for a long time, even before the project began. This clarity ended up being very rewarding as I knew exactly what kind of atmosphere and aesthetic I wanted to create. Over time, my mental vision of the film grew clearer.