Evaluation Question 7

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

For our preliminary task, our brief was to film someone walking through a door, sitting down opposite someone else and exchanging a few lines of conversation. Before filming our preliminary task we had to create a story board for the different shots we were going to use in our filming. We found this helped a lot because we included more shots following the story board than we would have done just from memoryWhen looking back at my preliminary task, these were the main points I needed to take into consideration:

One factor being, it’s essential to draw up your storyboard correctly in the beginning to save time on deciding what to do later. Also it would be ideal to have script for each character as a lot of time was wasted and re filmed due to actors forgetting their lines.

Another factor when filming ensures actors are not speaking over each other because when editing on final cut it becomes hard to portray the shot reverse shot.

Another thing I learnt about was filming precisely within the framework of the camera. This is a very important part when filming as the camera doesn’t need unnecessary items in the background. Therefore the position of the characters must be precise in order to show them in the frame without having unwanted headroom. Whilst this is being done the eye line match for the pair having a conversation needs to be in proportion to the camera as this helps to accurately film.

Before filming the opening 2 minutes of my film, I looked back at the bullet points above to check what I needed to improve on from my preliminary task. This therefore made me aware of what I needed to improve on for my opening 2 minutes.

I think that we learnt a number of things in the progression from out Preliminary task to our full 2 minute Film Opening including:

• Headroom - we learnt about not leaving unnecessary headroom in order to frame our shots more appropriately.
• When we had finished filming, we used basic editing skills such as cuts.
• Editing techniques - we learnt how to edit sound for our 2 minute Film Opening which we did not know how to do for our preliminary task and manipulate images, for example when our character is having flashbacks we edited the images to make the look slightly distorted and so it make you feel like you are in her position, looking down at the baby.
• Continuity - from editing our Preliminary Task we learnt how important planning was to preserve continuity in our film. Therefore we filmed everything on the one day, this is because we needed to make sure that our actors were wearing the exact same outfits and had their hair and make-up done in the exact same way each time. This is why we decided to shoot in one evening as we would not then have any problems with different coloured shoes for example.
• The three camera rules (match on action, shot-reverse-shot and the 180 degree rule) - even though we did learn these rules for our Preliminary Task, we learnt how to apply them more effectively in our 2 minute Film Opening.

The top picture is of my preliminary task and as you can see, the shot is framed badly due to there being a lot of headroom above both the character. However, as seen in the picture below, our character fills the frame much better as there is not much headroom above her.