Evaluation Question 7

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

When working on our prelim, I had the basic skills necessary to use the equipment and software. As a group, we were confident in our knowledge of shot types which made the pre-production of our work quite easy. We were able to plan our shots, ensuring that we used a variety of shot types and camera angles. We then transferred the pictures to QuarkXPress to make our storyboard. One thing we learnt from planning was that our pictures had broken the rule of thirds. In comparison, our planning for our thriller was much more detailed and took longer as a group to work on. We spent more time planning our shots and the storyboard itself is much more descriptive. This made filming easier as we knew exactly what we needed to film. We also spent longer deciding on the location of our thriller. We had discussed as a group the type of place that we wanted to film and then took some pictures individually of the locations we thought would work well with our thriller. We then looked over the photos to help us decide on where to film.

                    

A figrig. 

During the production of our prelim, we faced some difficulties which gave us the opportunity to improve on when filming our thriller. The lighting of the corridor we filmed in was extremely dim, we wasn't aware of the impact bad lighting can have on your footage. It wasn't until the editing of our prelim that we realised we needed extra lighting in some of our shots.

We followed our storyboard during filming to make sure we remembered to match cut and reverse shot that we had planned. One piece of equipment I used, that I hadn't used before, was a figrig. A figrig is used for tracking and helps to prevent your hands from shaking while walking.

The filming of our prelim wasn't efficent as we had to wait for other students who were walking past or talking. We also found it difficult to follow the rule of thirds for Layla's over the shoulder shot as there wasn't much space in the room we were filming in.
I also learnt about the 180 degree rule while filming our prelim, we followed this rule while filming our thriller too.

During post-production, we used Final Cut Pro to put together our shots and add our match cut (shown below).

Screen shot: editing our prelim on Final Cut Pro.

I found editing easy as we didn't have to add other effects or sounds. Because we didn't edit the sounds of our prelim, you can hear some students talking at one point. I learnt afterwards that we could have lowered the volume at that point or removed the sound.









We made sure that we filmed our thriller when there was natural lighting, on one of our days of filming we found that our shots were too dark so we re-shoot them. Here is an example of the improvement in lighting from our prelim to our thriller.






My skills have improved since the prelim as I have developed my editing skills. I learnt how to create split screens. On the left is an example of a split screen from our thriller.  We used split screens as well as cross cuts to help the to show that both characters would eventually collide.









The framing of our shots improved in our thriller. Here is a close up shot of Layla and Nyomi shaking hands in our prelim and some examples of close-up's in our thriller.

We also added titles to our thriller. Although I knew how to add titles on Final Cut Pro, I learnt more about changing font sizes and ensuring that the titles were within 'title safe'. On the right is a comparison of a shot from our prelim and from our thriller.