Evaluation Question 7:

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

Brief for the preliminary task:
‘Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanged a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.’

Brief for main task:
‘The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.’

Why did we do the prelim task beforehand, and what did it teach me?
The prelim task provided us with some experience of shooting and filming a sequence, with the focus on continuity. It made us realise how much you need to consider when filming, for example which foot someone was walking on, which hand they used to hold an object…etc. Continuity was also the main focus when editing, and this taught us how important it was to cut shots together to make a sequence flow seamlessly and make it easy to understand.



Pre-production:
The prelim task helped me to learn that storyboarding is a key part of pre-production, and is definitely needed during production, to make shooting times quicker, easier, and more efficient.
Our prelim task was very structured, as we knew exactly what we had to do, and where we were going to shoot it: in school. This meant that we didn’t exactly have to do a location reccie; we just had to look at the room we were in, and draw up a simple storyboard around it.
However, for our final project, a location reccie was needed so that we could see where we could film it, and if it would be practical. For our scenes inside the house, it was easy to find a location, as we could just use Robbie’s house. However research was needed for our bus stop scene, and this was done via our knowledge of the area, and Google maps.



So from the pre-production of the prelim and the final project, I learnt that planning is key and essential to make production go smoothly and without any complications, and the use of storyboarding and location reccies are very important.

Our skills at drawing storyboards also progressed, with us drawing a very basic storyboard on paper for our prelim task, and a large colour-coded post-it note storyboard for our final project:



Production:
The most important thing that I learnt from the production of the prelim task in my opinion is the issue of time. We had a very tight schedule to film all our shots for our prelim, and this knowledge of time management helped in the shooting of our final project. The experience we got from filming our prelim, e.g. shooting, using the microphone and hearing through headphones, also gave us support in shooting our final opening sequence, which helped too.
The prelim also gave us the knowledge of shot order, and which shots to film first. For our prelim, we shot all the shots inside the room first, and then all the shots from outside in the hallway, and this helped us to not only save time, but to organise ourselves better. This new understanding of shot order helped us to plan for our real shoot, saving us time there as well.

Our skills at producing shot logs and shot lists also improved, as shown by the image below. For our prelim, we only needed a few shots, so this was easily just typed up, but for our main task, we had many different shots, so we wrote out a shot list in the shooting order, and produced many different tables:



Post-production:
Editing our prelim task was beneficial for our final project as it not only familiarised us with how to use Adobe Premiere, but also reminded us of all the continuity rules and how important they are to produce a seamless narrative. The editing of the prelim task was pretty basic, as all we needed to do was cut up the shots and place them in the right order; no particular editing techniques were needed.
I think that was the main difference between the prelim and the main task: the new different editing techniques. I think I learnt a lot during the editing sessions of our final project, and I have progressed a lot in the use of different software. I now know how to use different colour grading tools in Adobe Premiere, and how to make titles using Live Type.

Teamwork:
The prelim task also further increased my confidence and teamwork skills, which was vital in our final project. It made me realise how much there is to do and how you need to split the work evenly between all members, letting each person shoot a few shots, use the headphones in a few shots, and edit a few shots too. So with this knowledge, and an almost perfect combination of partners and friends to work with, I think that our project went as smoothly as possible, and I had a lot of fun making it too.