Preliminary Task Evaluation

1.       What planning did you do? How was this useful, and how did you change from your plans?

In our group we each created our own story board to plan out the happenings in our preliminary task. The storyboard labels what actions the camera should be doing (type of shot) what is happening in the scene and who should be in it. It also lists how many shots we will be shooting, no doubt the filming of our preliminary task will differ slightly to the storyboard but it gives us an idea of what our shots would look like and an overview of the film as a whole.

We also created a shot list, which simply listed all the shots we had to film of the subjects acting. It clearly shows the situation, who is in the scene and where we are filming before the list of shots. I think the list or shots are a lot clearer than the story board and I preferred using that to the story board, it is less time consuming and easier and simpler to produce.

These helped us gain an idea of how long our preliminary task would be and how it would look, we made a few amendments whilst filming; we filmed too many shots and started to go off-storyboard and over complicated the task. We made it harder for ourselves by doing this and managed to film over shots we had already completed. Ultimately we had to film a lot of the ending shots again but they turned out better than the ones before so it ended well.

2.       What camera skills have you developed? How confident are you with using the cameras, and has this confidence changed during the project? Give details of specific camera skills/techniques you have developed/improved, and include areas where you lack confidence/need to improve?

Having completed camera work before I already had an understanding of how camera angles have an effect on the audience and what they portray. For example the worm’s eyes view shot is often used to indicate fear, for the audiences view it shows events from the character’s venerable perspective. I have my own camera at home so I often get to use it to progress my skills in camera work. Although I have learnt about new types of shots and following that the effects that they have on the audience and what they see from the character’s perspective. I feel I have improved my understanding of how ‘working title films’ and big films are made, I can’t watch a film now without thinking about what type of shot it is, it has made me more aware of how films are shot. I think my editing side is strong, in the past I have made my own videos and enjoyed editing them together, I also filmed music videos with my friends in my spare time, and so I have had experience in trying to achieve the repetitive effect that videos aim to achieve.

3. What editing skills have you developed? How confident are you with using the editing program? Give details of specific editing skills/ techniques you have developed/improved, and include areas where you lack confidence/need to improve?

I have developed my skills in that I now know how to use a new editing programme which makes me more versatile when it comes to generally editing videos. I have also learnt the easiest way of editing on that specific programme ‘Adobe Elements’ I feel I am fairly confident using the programme, having had previous experience editing videos, it is pretty easy to understand and work out, also the programme isn’t too complicated which makes the process a lot smoother, you encounter less problems whilst carrying out the editing process. I think once you have ‘captured’ all of the footage you need, it is pretty basic, but I have done it before so that worked to my advantage. The only problem we encountered whilst editing was the cameras, some of the leads were broken and some of the cameras not charged which made the process take a lot longer than it should have done which was mildly frustrating. However it only took us about an hour to edit once all of the footage was on and saved. My partner and I had both edited before which made the experience a lot smoother than it would have been. I am pleased with the outcome of our edit and cut, hopefully it will be different to others.