Question 7

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

Preliminary brief

Film and edit a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character. It had to feature a couple of lines of dialogue then must exchanged between characters and match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule should be demonstrated.

 Main task

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 candidates, with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source).

There were more parts to the main task for this task we needed patience, determination, eagerness but most importantly commitment without this me and my peers would have made a bad opening sequence as lack of wanting to do it, but as we all had a thrill and a thirst for film it was done.

Pre-production

For our prelimary task location was a issue this was because although we went to check the availability of the room we didn’t initiate a set reminder for the teacher of the room this meant that our initial idea to use the geography 4 room was being used for a year 9 detention and we were stuck without a place in which to shoot our scene. To fix this we simply asked if there were any room available for and then used that one. In our main task we avoided problems such as this by asking for consent for the locker room and double and then triple checking if the time slot for us to use that room was by which also available ensuring there were no issues for our main task. For our prelimary task we faced an issue with cast this was a factor as our cast were limited to filming for only a limited amount of time this set our filming back and nearly made us miss deadline if we didn’t find another actor immediately we resolved this by looking for an alteration in which we found simply lurking around in the corridors intrigued by all the cameras around. We made sure that this issue did not persist in the main task by drawing up a consent form after finding our actor informing his parents in the partaking of our project and also texted him the day before and the morning of filming of each day we were filming in order to remind him. In the prelimary task I also learnt the importance of making sure that your tripod was functioning properly and the spirit level was in the middle before putting on the camera. In our main task we ensure that the tripod was always screwed tightly and the spirit level was balanced at every shot. In the prelim task when making our treatment it was very limited as to the detail that went in it, we didn’t really talk in much depth as to what was going to happen. In the main task we made sure that we had a very detailed treatment were we allowed a more accurate and creative picture with our words. In team work we were all over the place and were finding it hard to cope with what was to be done and when to be done it by this messed up our filming time and also messed up our actors. In our main task we made sure that everything was split evenly and that everyone had something to do in order to make sure a fair amount of work was put in by each member on the team and just not stressed on one person.

Production

When it came down to production in our prelimary task with did not face much problems with our tripod as the others but we did find it difficult to come to terms to the change of room, we fixed this by altering our room a little bit were the positioning of everything would be better in line with the movement of our film. As a result of this in our main task we made sure that location was set on by triple checking with the teachers of the room availability by emailing them twice and also visiting them to remind them a few hours before was going to take place there; we wanted to make sure everything was ready before anything began we did this by checking how the room looked and planned ahead with photo’s as to the exact positioning of where we would shoot.  In our prelimary task we encountered a problem were a lot of attention was drawn to us by school children as we were filming which was a major distraction we made sure we would fix this in the main task by waiting to film all our shots outside and in open spaces were the children and students all had lessons to ensure minimal disturbance. When using the tracks we had problems such as it not being long enough so to fix it we started recording to capture more of the footage. In our shots we didn’t have much variety he had the basic long shot and wide shot and only over the shoulder shot this did not allow a varied amount of angles or shot types to be projected and made our film fairly dull. We wanted to have a large variety of shots in our main task adding different angles to implement what we wanted our character to be perceived as. In our team work for production we were fairly organised in our prelim but we did all have flaws like time management in shooting and having equal amounts to do. In the main task we were split into different sections had a time to finish each shot for to allow us to be on time and responsible for our work.

Post Production

After filming there was a big task of editing we faced very few problems using adobe premiere but there were some major issues such as when we first started using adobe there was a problem of understand how to bin work and also drag and drop but we soon picked that up as more usage of adobe came into terms, when using adobe premiere we found it that our work would crash a lot at first we didn’t know what to do and would simply close the software but now before closing the software we would make sure our work was saved in order to allow any changes to be made adapted to the new software. Our skills progressed gradually as we used premiere more things such as cropping our work to fit the line of music and adding cross-fades from the shot to the credit to allow more of a professional outlook. In our work we used the navigation palette a lot as it showed our timeline and we had to move the shots around. In our prelimary task we had no music this made our film fairly dull. We added music in our work that was copyright free. Feedback was fairly difficult to take on as some of the terms used in the prelimary task were not understood but later as we developed an understanding for adobe premiere it was easier to alter our work to a more suitable standard