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

The preliminary task was a perfect basis to learn skills that were vital for our final production. There’s many differences between the two products: The preliminary didn’t provide the opportunity for originality to show, there were set guidelines that were essential for the completion. In the final production, as a group, we had free reign over the plot, characters and cinematography. Despite these differences there were many skills provided by the prelim task with aided our production for the final one.

One of the most important things we learnt from the preliminary was organisation. It was essential to keep track of planning stages to enable the completion of the task to a high level. There was extensive planning needed for the final production including shot lists, multiple plot ideas, location ideas and camera angle ideas. As we were given specific actions to carry out in the preliminary task there was only a certain amount of planning needed. The organisational factor was an important lesson to draw from the practise task.

Another essential aspect we learnt from the preliminary task was to ensure continuity is kept throughout the entire footage. When editing together the preliminary footage it was clear slight issues such as the foot that’s steps out of a doorway needed to be planned carefully. We incorporated this factor in our final task through shot sequences such as match on action, when the antagonist is walking towards the shed and opening the gate. Linked into the continuity was the raw footage we filmed. We learnt from the preliminary task a lot more footage needed to be filmed, in comparison to the time cap given for the product. With providing ourselves with a lot more film than needed it gave up options for the raw footage. Changing the order of the footage can completely change how the edited sequence is perceived by the audience, this is something we didn’t have the opportunity to do with the prelim task however it was still a vital lesson we learnt whilst producing the preliminary task.

The shot durations were another factor learnt from the preliminary task. The atmosphere surrounding a character can be easily determined by the shot lengths if it is corresponding to the music being played. In the preliminary the sound effect played when the antagonist (played by Grace) was slow, building up. We then edited together a long duration panning shot. As the gentle loudness in music and long duration shot matched up together the atmosphere surrounding the character was negative. We flipped this around during our final task by having pacing music which climaxed and fell multiple times. Majorly when the antagonist was in shot the duration was short and changed angles multiple times, this created a disorientated effect which perceived our theme of abduction well.

Many things were learnt during the completion of the preliminary task, they ranged in importance however when accumulated together are highly significant. The short duration matching up with the music could only have been successful if continuity was kept throughout the filming and nothing would have been successful if the planning and organisational side wasn’t established. The progression between the two tasks is significant. The range of shots used in the final task stemmed from the inspiration from our preliminary. As a group we also learnt giving enough time to film and re-film footage provided the basis for a successful title sequence.