Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression

from it to the full product?

By Josie Crandley 12JMT

Preliminary task:

• My group’s ‘Have you fed the fish…?’ task was not very successful.

• Our camera was not one that is normally used, and we did not know that we had to have a microphone attached for sound to break through.

• And, as we had no sound, we had to use subtitles overlapping the speech so our audience knew what was going on.

Difficulties:

• One of the people we were having act in our task was absent, and so we had to find somebody else.

• The sound and/or microphone was not working and so there was no sound in our video, which we then had to put subtitles on.

• Due to the fact that we only had a singular lesson to film, our location was limited, and our ideas were not as ‘big’ as they could’ve been.

Planning:

• As a group (Ella, Sam, Tom and myself) we worked really well together as a team, shooting ideas and possible location spots in each lesson.

• We were well organized at first, but due to one of the actors falling ill, our actual production suffered.

• We had chosen to make our task suspicious, and after drawing a storyboard of ‘The Boss’ in a park, half hidden by a tree.

Camera shots:

• We used an establishing shot to decipher our location, and I used a similar shot in my opening sequence (Enough is Enough…), which opened the scene and showed the audience the location.

• In both sequences I used a shot-reverse-shot, which was created to show two people in the middle of a conversation.

• It was hard to decide what camera shots and angles to use, as the Preliminary Task and my actual opening sequence were completely different genres, but it made me realize what shots I knew would not work.

The editing process:

• The preliminary task used basic editing, we did not use anything too fancy.

• We had to add subtitles to our preliminary task, as the sound was not working, and so as we used our basic editing skills to create a short sequence, it gave me better knowledge of editing.

• My preliminary task was edited on Imovie, whereas my opening sequence was created on Final Cut. The simplicities of Imovieactually made it more difficult to edit, knowing that we had limits to our work.