Evaluation Question 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 Preliminary Task

A continuity task involving filming and editing:

• a character opening a door

• crossing a room

• Sitting in front of another character and exchanging a couple of lines of dialogue with them.

This task should demonstrate:

• match on action

• shot/reverse shot

• the 180-degree rule

Brief for Main Task

The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.

During the whole process I learnt a lot about the importance of planning and organisation:

• Deciding on a target audience early on was crucial so that we could adapt our storyline to best fit the target audience, and to make our opening as successful as possible.

These are some of the key things I think helped most with our planning:

• We had multiple meetings as a group so that we all agreed on everything, or we could work out any potential errors before actually shooting.

For the actual shooting process:

• We held multiple practise shoots, with some taking place at school like the video below:

On the days of our actual shoots so that we could set the camera and tripod in good time, and so we were able to re-arrange any furniture that would have affected our continuity.

For the editing process:

• Because we used shot lists, and shot logs whilst on shoot, we were able to quickly capture the precise take we wanted as we had already decided which the best version was.
• We put our clips into bins depending on when we shot them so we could easily tell which clips were where.
• We put the clips next to each other on alternate tracks so that it was we could to see which clip to edit without having to zoom in.

The evaluation process:

• To get a good idea of audience feedback for our film opening, we organised a screening at school, which we advertised with posters and word of mouth. This is so we can test the film out on our target audience, with a large enough group in one go.