Evaluation Question 7

Q7) Looking back at your preliminry task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Research

When starting the course and making our preliminary activity we had minimal skills.
We had minimal research into our task, I only learnt about basic shot types and a little about camera movement. such as what the 180 degree rule was and how to do match cuts. We did not do any further preparations sun as genre or convention research.

In comparison for our final piece we conducted a lot of research and experimentation into audience genre and its conventions. We knew what we would have had to include into our film for it to be appealing to our target audience and this made it more successful.

Pre-production/Planning

Our pre production planning was also a lot more developed in our final piece.
in our preliminary activity we had minimal planning, only including a few props such as a surgical mask, a notepad and a pen. Our location was limited to college and we did it in a classroom making it an unsuccessful location to the action going on in the footage. No further planning was done.

Our Final however involved a lot of planning including storyboarding, blogging to prepare for our filming, planning location and props as well as planning costumes and our actual opening idea. We did all this in order to make our filming as quick and efficient as possible. When we went out to film we knew exactly what we were going to be doing.

Filming


I think throughout the time our filming improved the most. We now know how to use a variety of different shot types and how they can be edited and work together to make a visually interesting scene.

In our preliminary activity we did use different shot types such but when constructing them we did not use a tripod and therefore our shots were shaky a lot making them look unprofessional and uncomfortable to watch. Our filming was also unfocused as at that stage we would forget to focus our shots. We also had no consideration for lighting or head space when shooting from different angles and at different times of day.

Our filming for our final however was well framed, we were aware of our head space and lighting for the same scenes. Our shots were also steady and focused. We also used things such as the rule of thirds or high low long and close up shots to make our opening interesting to watch. A skill we defiantly didn't have when filming our prelim.

Editing

In our preliminary activity our editing was very limited, we were not yet comfortable at this stage with using the editing software and we didn't know enough about continuity editing to be able to create successful  match cuts or cross cuts. At one point we broke the 180 degree rule in our filming. our sound levels throughout the footage was uncontrolled and therefore at some points you couldn't hear the text. Also we were not able to add text to out footage to create a title sequence.

However, by the time of creating our final product we were comfortable and able to edit using all those skills. We successfully edited match cuts cross cuts and shot reveres shots to make the editing continuous and seamless. We also added text on our footage and sound to accompany our action successfully. All these things made it possible to put together a well constructed film.

In summary I have developed greatly and learnt a lot from both these tasks. In my opinion my greatest development was in filming and you can definitely see the improvement in this most.