Evaluation - Question 7 - Claire

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

Here you need to explain how you think you have progressed from the preliminary task to the main task. You should discuss your development of technical skills – the use of camera, sound editing, vision editing, your use of continuity editing and your construction of character and story. Again, use screen grabs and make cross refs to earlier blog entries).

From looking back at my preliminary task, I have realised how much more work we had to do just to create an extra minute of filming. The importance of titling, non-diegetic and diegetic sound for the continuity.  The editing process to keep the continuity was defiantly more difficult, due to issues with our story line we had to make a lot of it up as we went along which was really unprofessional, but because of this we didn’t have planned sections which meant each time we filmed Kayla was in a different position which made putting clips together very difficult.

Although we had many issues, we did come very far in all aspects of the editing and filming process.

Camera work – I tried to keep the camera constantly straight and not on an angle unless it was supposed to be to keep the professionalism.  I was framing more, so we didn’t have to crop or have loads of background scenery that we didn’t want. We played around with the depth of field this time to give our footage a bit more contrast and importance for clips. We used a variety of different shot sizes again, but this time we didn’t put them all face front on the actor. 

We also took the advice of our teacher Andrew Man to make our Shot reverse shot sequence longer than in our prelim so we did.

we learned how important lighting is and how to do it well. As you can see from our prelim task we didn't use a lot of lighting and because of this it was hard to see all of Kayla's facial expressions, where as in our final piece we lite up the room and our actors more.

We also kept the 180 degree rule.  I think our continuity in our preliminary because we had less movement on equipment. For example in our prelim Kayla stayed in one place and her movements where the same each time and the clip of me walking was the same clip used and cut again and again. However we experimented more with kayla’s movements in our Thriller opening so it was harder to get the same movements. Especially while on the swing and seasaw, it was difficult to get the same angles and exactly timing of when she went up, or moved forward on the swing in the same way with the same body language. This is one of our biggest problems and we realised how hard it is to film with one camera.

For the sound, I realised how important ambient sound actually is, we didn’t have any ambient sound in our prelim because of the non-diegetic soundtrack, the ambient sound we recorded on our sound recorder was muffled, you could hear footsteps, breathing and giggling from people. This affected the process because I had to find sound from the original footage that I could use that didn’t have talking over it or that was muffled. This is a very important part of the opening because of the setting and scenery. Also the timing for when Kayla and Alisa spoke was difficult to match up as it was recorded separately to the filming.

The editing process time was in some ways taken for granted, although we used all lesson time, except for the deadline week no one went back to carry on editing and for the footage editing to be done quicker which meant a lot of work was rushed in the end process. I think the time management needed improving so that we could all be more pleased with the final outcome than we were.  

We had many issues with our story line and characters and you will see in various blog posts. We over thought our story line and what we would realistically be able to do with our time and £0 budget. We had trouble getting actors and a place to film. This put us behind and intern meant we didn’t get to do a full character build, we made the personality of the character and what they are like but due to not having enough time because of those problems the character wasn’t as good as it could have been. This is something for us to improve on in the future.