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

Preliminary Brief: Film and edit a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character. A couple of lines of dialogue must then exchanged between characters & match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule should be demonstrated.

Main Task: The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes (all video and audio material must be original, produced by candidates, with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source)

In the prelim task I had little understanding to do the following treatment, pitch, posters, mood boards, script, storyboard, location recces, casting, shooting schedule, rehearsals, and timetable for the day.

 When doing the storyboard we as a group we had problems deciding of what shots to pick and what order to put them in to make them effective, This is because we had different creative ideas of how we wanted it to look. We decided to take time, effort and dedication to put the right shots to get the final outcome. When filming our prelim task we had to be aware of equipment, cast, location, timing, weather, continuity, variety of shots, re shoots .We did not use a location recces and this caused problems when it came to the shooting day as we found out that we had to come back another due as the room we was using had already been booked and this meant that we needed to shoot the next day, we had to book the room, make sure the actors could all turn up and we had to make sure we kept the continuity. Eve though we tried are best to keep the continuity there were small things that went wrong , for example the actors was wearing different clothes and shoes and the clock on the wall was  different time than before. To solve this we decided to book the room for the following day to make sure we didn’t have any further problems. We did not create a shooting schedule, and this began to show a problem when we came to shooting as we spent too much time on each shot which resulted in us not having a lot of time to shoot the rest of our shots. So when we realised this we decided to create a shooting scheduled as it saved us time, we did not have good organisation skills. By the end of the prelim task I knew that it was very important to plan out everything to make sure that the shooting day would go smoothly.

As we did not have all the props the story photo board was hard to create the shots we needed, so instead we made a solution to use other objects that could represent the props we needed. As our film opening doesn’t have any on screen dialogue i found it hard to write the script as I didn’t know how it had to be laid out, But after being showed a short clip on how to do it the solution was solved. Casting became a problem as we only had three people in our and two of them were female and we needed a male character so we had to rotate our roles when that character was being shot. After doing this task I learnt that preparation is important and things need to be organised.

When completing the main task we had to think about equipment, cast, location, timing, cut away shots, variety of shots, re shoots especially continuity this was because we used special lighting we had to make sure it was correct in each shot. We had problems with the lighting as some shots were too dark and you were not able to see them. So we had to decide to re shoot as the shots were important to the film opening. I learnt that even though the lighting can be very effective it sometimes can be very hard to use and can cause problems with continuity. As in the prelim task we did not use a location recce we made sure that we had completed one and that we had booked them room and made sure that it was free for us to use fro the whole. This worked well as we did not have to turn up on shooting day worrying about if we had to stop sometime in the day due to the room being pre-booked. Not creating a shooting schedule in the prelim task worked as a disadvantage for us as we was time wasting. For the main task I learnt that using a shooting schedule helped the group save time as we had time left over to shoot any extra shoots that we thought were creative and will help make our opening sequence better.

Feedback was very important in the prelim task as it was our first time editing and we needed all the comments we could get to help improve it and to make it even better. I help to digitize the shots and to make a rough cut of the sequence. I learnt how to digitize and how to use the software adobe premiere. There was a problem with some with some of the shots as some was not steady or the continuity did not flow. However cause we did always more than 2 shots we was able to choose a suitable shot. I learnt in this task how to use the software and how to create a shot film.

As we needed to make our opening sequence look professional feedback was significant as we need to make sure that everything was correct. My main task was putting in the sound and voiceovers and making changes to the feedback what we got. For example “THe pause needs to be longer as it does not sound very professional”  so we made the pause longer between the shots to make it more effective. We also got positive feedback like “I really like how the sound matches the opening sequences” “ love how the shot quick shots work as they add tension” this reassured us that we was doing a good job. We had a problem as the computer kept on crashing so we had to resave  our work at least 4 times and we had to make sure that we was saving it every 5 minutes to prevent losing our hard work. In this task I learnt how to import sound and how to use the effects with the sound.