Evaluation of Finished Production - Question seven

Looking back at the preliminary task, What do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the product?




Above is our preliminary task, when watching it back I relaised there were many differences between this and our thriller opening. The quality of the video is not as good as what the thriller opening was, and we can see big improvments between the two videos.

Our preliminary task had not been prepared as well as what our main thriller had and we did not out as much time or effort into what we was doing with it. This lead to us only have a half completed storyboard to work from and no clue to the plot of our preliminary task. When filming our preliminary tasks many of the shots were repeated as we had not written down the variety of shots which could of been used. When we was making the storyboard to our thriller we made sure there was lots of detail added to it so we had a variet of shots and angles and it would not become boring. Although we did not completely stick to our storyboard when filming as we thought of better more exciting ways to films.

When looking at the Prliminary exercise i noticed below that where comments are left their was one dislike to to it although there was no comments explaining why they had disliked it, although it may be that there was no story to our preliminary task it was mainly people walking.

Storyboard to Preliminary Task;

Storyboard to our Thriller opening;



Sound was a particular problem for us during our preliminary exercise, when filming we did not know how loud or quietly we would have to speak for the camera to pick up voices from a far distance, so at some points sound is barely noticable and at other times it is like the characters are shouting. Also when we was editing our preliminary task as we did not understand how the sound on the computer, we were not sure if the computer was defficient or if we had not turned the sound up. Either way, as a result of this when watching the finished piece on youtube we noticed that in some placed you could hear the director saying 'Go!' there was lack of continuity and some of the sound had been cut off. When editing our Thriller we made sure we knew how the sound worked and knew that we was at a computer with fully functioning speakers, also our skills with using the computers had developed meaning we could create sound bridges so sound from a previous piece of footage continued on, We also learnt dissolves and fades with the sound so that our thriller flowed well and the sound was not out of place with what was on screen.

The variety of shots we used in our preliminary task where very little compared to the number of shots we used during our thriller. Also the shots used in our preliminary exercise were at a poor quality for example, the pan shot could sometimes be too slow and the the characters could walk out of shot, or it would pan to fast meaning the characters would again not be in shot.

 The image above is a point in the preliminary task where the two characters where spread too far apart within the short meaning it was difficult for the cameraman to keep them both in shot, which thus meant this girl at the back drifted out of shot. However due to lack of time this had to be included in our preliminary task as we did not have time to film over it.

However in our actual thriller we made sure that all 3 characters could be seen at one point and explained to our actors not to all step over the gate at the same time but slowly after each other, this left a small enough gap for all 3 people to be seen but not a too bigger gap so that some characters were off screen whilst others were left behind.

Since completeing our Preliminary task our skills developed rapidly and using final cut express and using the camera together became a lot easier as the technology wasnt so new to us when it come to filming our thriller. The adjusting of the sound took some getting used to but we worked it out and overall learnt new editing tecniques and understood new and different types of transitions.