LOOKING BACK AT YOUR PRELIMINARY TASK, WHAT DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE

LEARNT IN THE PROGRESSION FROM IT TO THE MAIN TASK?

OUR GROUP At the start of the year we originally were going to work in a group of four. This consisted of me, Emma, Emily and Amy. were all friends and thought it would be fun to work together because we all had so many amazing ideas. However when moving forward with our project and mind mapping what and who was going to do what it became apparent that us all having something to do was not going to happen. We all took note of each others ideas but actually incorporating them all into the film was a lot harder than I previously expected. We later decided we were going to split the group, in order to involve everyone's creative ideas. It also gave everyone the opportunity to take a roll in the creative side of production, no one was left with nothing to do at this point. But, Emma then left sixth form which then left me by myself. I didn’t want to work on my own and wanted to be in a group so we joined back together as a three and I contributed ideas around that we could do. This means that I was a latecomer to the production, however I caught up with the work and found out all the initial ideas for this film and also provided.

PRELIMINARY TASK At the beginning of the year, I didn’t know hardly anything about media, however I did know that I wanted to develop my skills and knowledge further into the subject. I had never done any editing, filming or been part of a media production before, so I wasn’t very confident in making our preliminary task. However, by doing our preliminary task I learnt ways to use to camcorder, the tripod as well as premier pro to edit all our clips together. By doing this in our preliminary it put me in a good position when using them later on in our final production. It also gave me and other people in my group the confidence when it came to our final production in which we used all three of the products.

WERE THERE ANY MISTAKES IN OUR PRELIMINARY TASK?

One thing that went wrong within our preliminary task was the sound. The sound that we added was irrelevant and also didn’t have much meaning behind it. Also when the characters were talking, it wasn’t very clear and you could hardly understand what both of the characters were saying.

Another mistake that happened in our preliminary task was the editing. When both the characters were speaking we noticed that we cut out part of the speech. This then meant we missed what one of them were saying so it wouldn’t really make much sense for the person watching it. This was a problem because it then made our final production for our preliminary less professional and less appealing to the viewers watching as they wouldn’t be able to understand and hear the dialogue correctly.

I think another thing we didn’t really think about was mise-en-scene. We didn’t use any different costumes or effects to present our characters any differently which the audience may have found boring and then to improve this I would make sure that we actually do mix up our costumes and editing to make sure the audience don’t get bored and pay attention.

Another issue I noticed was the quality of the footage. We used a standard camcorder to get the clips for our preliminary task. I noticed the footage was not the best quality, it was slightly fuzzy. So I had already decided that when making our final film we should use a DSLR because of the amazing quality it produces.

IMPROVEMENTS FROM THE PRELIMINARY TASK

Although our preliminary task had everything that we needed to have in it, in the production. We only mainly used basic camera angles such as the shot/reverse shot and mid shots. To improve on from our preliminary task we added more camera angles, movements and shots on our final production of ‘MISSING’ to make it more professional. By doing a wide variety of shots it provided us with the chance to show of the location of where our production is set.

For example we used high angles shots, low angled shots, point of view shots, shot of them from behind and in front, close ups, establishing shots etc. this was done to create a more exciting and thrilling final production which leaves the audience wanting more.

I have realised story boarding is very important. When I do my next project I will be sure to plan all my shots and ideas out on a story board first, as I struggled to remember all the shots I needed which then caused difficulties in continuity.

From planning and research to the editing of the film, our group has gained much experienced and had improved since the preliminary task. We have made good progression and improvements. For the research and planning stage, this greatly improved as for blog posts they were more detailed and had a range of different terminology used in them, we also researched much more about thrillers and what they typically contain than we did for the preliminary task. As for the production we learnt about time management and how to spend it wisely. Because of the preliminary task it helped us out when taking the equipment out of school as we had already learnt how to handle the equipment. We also had a larger time scale for this production rather than the preliminary which gave us more time to watch over the shots we had taken and if there was any bad shots then we could go out and retake them without worrying about the time.

FINAL PRODUCTION We also managed to make the editing of the final production much better than the preliminary task. The editing was smoother, used a wider range of transitions as well as different effects. As the sound in our preliminary task was not up to a good standard, we made sure that in our final production it was a main priority and try and improve from this. When in post production editing our clips on premier pro, some of our clips changed sound so we added an effect on it to make it flow through.