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

This task has taught me a great deal; not only about working in a group (and those constraints) but also about technical problems that can unexpectedly arise during filming. The filming process took longer than I expected due to a few issues with the camera. I think our preliminary task clearly demonstrated match on action (when the main character walked through the door), shot reverse shot (during the conversation), and the 180 degree rule.

The first problem that occurred and has taught me a few things was the choice of our actors in the preliminary task: it took a long time to film a standard amount of footage as they didn’t take it very seriously; this resulted in a lot of wasted time combined with poor quality footage so choosing the right actors was a pinnacle point in the opening two minutes of the film. Therefore, I have chosen Aran Alisiroglu, Muhammed Rahman, Zubin Parekh and Richard Young to act in the film because they had previous experience in the film industry, acting and directing.

Poor actors - Looking at the camera whilst filming

The next experience I learned was that the footage hadn’t recorded properly as the camera wasn't set up to record on to the memory card so I had make sure in the opening two minutes it recorded and checked after every shot if it had recorded. So this taught me to always check that the camera is set up correctly and is recording on to the memory card – so we will not make the same mistake again.

Another moral was that our group did not have any organisation or planning, as we weren't able to decide on the storyline in the preliminary task, as well as the different types of shots and angles before we started filming; this could have saved a lot of time, the organisation of the group is very important and someone has to plan all the shots, so I have taken the responsibility to plan all the shots we took in the opening two minutes.

With editing, I've learnt and realised that it's not good to use the same type of ending of a shot. This is because in our preliminary, we only used jump cuts for each shot taken in during the task. This isn't useful for filming because good editing would consist of a wider range of ways to end shots as this would be more effective and look more professional in film making. In contrast with our opening two minutes, there's a clear difference in this matter as our opening two minutes contained a good range of fade in/out shots, dissolve shots, wipe shots etc. which proved to be more effective and made it a better piece of film overall, which wouldn't of been the case if we followed what we did the with our preliminary, so we have learnt from our preliminary in this aspect. I also learnt that test filming is very useful as the lighting of a shot can appear very different on a full screen as opposed to a camera screen; it’s normally much darker than you actually think it is. In the preliminary task I wasn't sure how to edit, it took me a few hours to get my head around how to edit in Adobe CS4 Acrobat, whereas in the full product it took me around the same time to edit although I had so much more to edit and choose, therefore I choose Pinnacle Studios to edit my film.

Poor quality of footage as well as a poor shot - would have been more effective if we used the subject in close up rather than medium shot.

In terms of camerawork, I feel that I've learnt that it's more effective to use a wider range of camera shots. It's more effective to use a wider range of shots because it helps to show that you've been more creative in your filming and helps improve the overall quality in many cases, in the majority of films, certainly for our film as it's a thriller/action film. In our film opening, we used a wider range of shot types than our preliminary task (low-angle, ECU, extreme long shot, over the shoulder shot etc.). When you contrast the two when watching them, it's easy to see the difference in quality and level of professionalism with the use of more camera shots in our film opening rather than the preliminary task, showing that there has been reasonable amount of progress since the preliminary task. This showing another thing I've learnt towards our film opening. Match-on-action and shot/reverse shot, and 180 degree rule we correctly and usefully constructed this in our preliminary task, as we had Liam opening the door and shot/reverse shot was used for the conversation between Liam and Richard. This shows that from our preliminary task, we learnt how to do this for progression to help benefit towards our final film opening. 

The 180-degree rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. An imaginary line called the axis connects the characters, and by keeping the camera on one side of this axis for every shot in the scene, the first character is always frame right of the second character, who is then always frame left of the first. The camera passing over the axis is called jumping the line or crossing the line.

Match on action (or cutting on action) is an editing technique for continuity editing in which one shot cuts to another shot portraying the action of the subject in the first shot. This creates the impression of a sense of continuity – the action carrying through creates a “visual bridge” which draws the viewer’s attention away from slight cutting or continuity issues. This is not a graphic match or match cut; it portrays a continuous sense of the same action rather than matching two separate things

Shot reverse shot is a continuity editing technique used in conversations or simply characters looking at each other or objects. A shot showing what the character is supposedly looking at (either a point of view or over the shoulder shot) is followed by a reverse angle shot of the character themselves looking at it, or of the other character looking back at them, for example. Shot reverse shot often ties in with the 180° rule to retain continuity by not distorting the audience’s sense of location of the characters in the shots.



All the shots in the preliminary tasks were taken shoulder height, so camera work was quite poor.

 

Here you can see that we used a low angle shot to make the Protagonist look more powerful, great, dominant and influential.

The following shot, I believe was one of the most influential shots in the whole two minutes, it was very effective and would entice audience most effectively:

This was an arc shot, a shot in which the subject is circled by the camera, somewhat like the tracking shot. 

I believe another shot which I have learned from the preliminary task that was quite effective was this:

With this shot being an over the shoulder shot, a shot of someone or something taken from the perspective or camera angle from the shoulder of another person. The back of the shoulder and head of this person is used to frame the image of whomever the camera is pointing toward. This type of shot is very common when two characters are having a discussion and will usually follow an establishing shot which helps the audience place the characters in their setting.

Although, looking back at our preliminary task, that lasted 12 seconds or so, was a big disappointment, as we could have managed to do something so much better than a person walking into a library to their friend, we could have included much more action to it, and a better story behind it! However, we only had an hour to film this, so did not have long enough to plan and think about what we will do. 

Overall, I believe the Preliminary task has taught me a little compared to the full product, we have spend many hours on making sure the final/full product is up to my satisfaction, whereas in the preliminary task we only spend a limited time on it, and as I wasn't in charge, I didn't have much say in the product.