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

Preliminary Task
Brief: 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 exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.


Main Task

Brief: 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 the candidate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright free source.

Pre-Production

For our prelim we used the following methods of pre-production:

• chose a genre
• brainstormed ideas for our sequence ensuring that we included; conversation & shot-reverse-shot, entering a room & match-on-action, 180 & 30 degree rules
• created a storyboard
• wrote a script
• created a shootboard

From our prelim we learned the importance of pre-production and its effects on production and post-production. During production for our prelim we discovered that the script we had created was far too basic, forcing us to waste time during production. In addition, the shootboard we had created was incredibly basic, not including sufficient shots. This issues not only led to time-wasting but also created problems during post-production where the shots we had filmed did not correspond with our shootboard shot numbers, making it incredibly difficult to edit our sequence efficiently. The changes in the script also made it very hard to edit the conversation as we had no real script to follow. Therefore, we learned that pre-production should not be neglected as it is a vital part of the film-making process.

We used the same methods of pre-production for our main shoot but used them more effectively in order to decrease the negative effects on production and post-production. For the main shoot, however, we did a location reccie. This was important because, unlike in our prelim, the location was incredibly important in defining our genre. The genre of our sequence was much more carefully decided and our sequence was constructed in order to appeal to our audience as much as possible, whereas with the prelim this wasn't the focus. 

Original Storyboard (click here)

shootboard (click here)

script (click here)

 

Production

The following Prezi shows what we learned from producing our prelim and how we applied that to our test shoot and, more importantly, our main shoot:

In addition to this, we also shot our main sequence in a similar way using cross cutting:


Although the majority of what we learned was about the actual filming of our sequence, we also learned a lot about organisation and efficiency. We discovered that we should always delegate some extra time to spontaneous shots, and be prepared for these in editing. This is because, during the shoots, we often had create and interesting new ideas that we wanted to try out, but limited time to do so. Some of these shots, for example the one below this, proved to be our most impressive shots from our test sequence and so we repeated them during our main shoot.

Post-Production

We learned a lot a about post-production throughout the project, with our skills continually developing as we moved the prelim to the test shoot to the final shoot.

Some information on how we edited our main sequence can be seen under the heading 'software' in this previous post.
For our prelim we used adobe premiere pro to put the sequence into the timeline in a basic way, creating a rough edit.

Post-production for the main shoot was a much more in-depth and time-consuming process than for the prelim as we had to include titles, a soundtrack and grade every shot in order to make our sequence look professional while achieving the brief. Therefore, we had to plan ahead for anything we would later need to edit. This meant that we had to be realistic in our planning process of what we could actually produce, for example how competent we would've been had we decided to use special effects.

Working as a Team

Throughout the project, I learned the importance of working as a team and how this can come of great benefit to your project. I learned that working with multiple people enables you to use each person's strengths to your advantage. Our group had a good dynamic and we were able to work together incredibly well, each person willing to make sacrifices and listen to the opinion of others within the group.

Here are some photos of us working together during the main shoot: