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

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. The task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.

Prelim Continuity Video

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

It is clear that there are some differences between the two briefs that we were given, a major one being that in the preliminary task we were set many things that had to be included, whereas in our main task, we had a lot more freedom to do what we wanted which I liked better as it allowed for creativity.

The prelim task first introduced me to the different hardware and software that we would be using in our main task and this enabled me to learn how to use these in advance so that I would be prepared and could contribute a lot in the main task.

In the main task we spent a lot more time on pre-production than in the prelim as we had more allocated media lessons and free time to do it. We made a timeline, a story board and a shotlist so that we knew exactly how we wanted things to run when getting our shots.

Our storyboard for the main task

Also, for production we only had a limited amount of space to shoot the prelim continuity sequence as it had to be shot in school during our media lessons and we could only use ourselves as characters so it was quite simple and restricted. But this gave us insight into the type of shots and angles that we could use when it came to our main task and improved our camera skills hugely. Our production for the main task was over a whole day and we had test shoot as well as a back up shoot to ensure we got the right shots. We also had a bigger space as it was shot in a house and many more extra characters.

This shows our opening shot, and clearly there is a big space and lots of characters

In post-production, we had more time to edit our main task than our prelim which allowed us to try out different effects in order to make our sequence better, but if we hadn't learned how to edit a continuity sequence in the prelim then we wouldn't have been able to experiment and produce a successful edit in our main task.

Conclusion:

The prelim was a very important starting point for this project as it taught us many things in pre-production, production and post-production, which enabled us to then go on to make a good opening sequence.