Preliminary task- Evaluation

When planning our prelim task we decided to draw out a storyboard and write out our shot list. This was very useful as we all knew what we were doing and the shots which would be used. We made a few changes to our shot list whilst filming because we decided that doing certain things would have a bigger impact on the audience, such as using the worms eye view at the beginning of the production as I was walking down the corridor which could make the audience feel like something bad was about to happen.

During the preparation and practise shots, we all had a go at shooting some different angles with a video camera. This was when I developed some camera skills such as shot-reverse-shot, worm’s eye and long shot. I feel much more confident with a camera after completing the preliminary task as I have learnt not only about the camera angles but about the rules of filming too. I feel I still need to develop my close up shot and my confidence by having more of an input with the filming of the project rather than the acting; I can improve on this during the thriller task.

My editing skills have improved as I understand how to use the program properly now, I can edit out clips we don’t need and I know how to make a series of frames run through smoothly. I still need to improve my confidence by using the program more so I understand how to add effects ECT.

Overall our preliminary task took just under two hours to film and one hour to edit, we tried to ensure we used a wide range of camera shots but not so many as to confuse the viewer. We decided that appropriate shots would be; worms eye view, over the shoulder, shot-reverse-shot and bird’s eye view. These shots worked well for us as we feel they helped portray the emotions shown in the footage.

When filming the conversation between Kirsty and myself, we decided to try two ways of filming it as the ' shot-reverse-shot' looked too unnatural in the raw footage. We tried filming the whole conversation with two cameras, one directed at me and one directed at Kirsty and this turned out to be the better footage as the conversation was much smoother.

Our group managed to avoid breaking the 180 degree rule when filming our footage. The 180 degree rule means making sure the characters have the same left/ right relationship to eachother. If this rule is broken it is likely that the viewer will become confused.

We used match on action to create a feeling of continuity within the footage, we did this by overlaping the footage to create a visual bridge.

We worked very well as a group and I would happily work as a group again! We all had different ideas which we tried our best to accommodate and our ideas all seemed to work well together. Everyone was listened to and no one was afraid to put their ideas across to the group which I think is very important. There were times when we had to be patient as Kirsty and I forgot our lines or laughed during filming but we re-filmed those parts and are looking to put our outtakes video on our blogs.