Question 7

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

Preliminary exercise brief: "Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule."

Our preliminary task was very important because we have to worry about the storyline a much, so we got to perfect our application of continuity techniques. The techniques we focused on the most were:

• Match on action:

• 180 degree rule and shot reverse shot:

Main task brief: the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes. All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source.

We filmed our opening in the Seward Studio in school, because it the right facilities and look for our film. To film here, we had to get permission and book the studio. This caused lighting problems because we were very restricted to when we could film in the evening/night. 

Whilst editing and filming, we decided to make a lot of script and shot changes to improve the flow of our opening, so our storyboard is very different to our final product.

Our animatic was extremely helpful, as we saw what our final product could look like, and we were able to change any dialogue that we thought would not sound right or change the order of shots or anything like that, so it reduced the amount of changes we would have to make later on. It reduced the shooting time, so we did not have to reshoot as much, which meant that we had more time to focus on the look of our final piece.

At our first practice shoot, we mostly spent time focusing on pictures for our animatic, which in hindsight we should not have focused on as much, and instead focused on trying to achieve the right lighting for our opening, as this caused a lot of problems later. When it came to our actual shoots, we would focus far too much on each individual shot so we did not have time to shoot everything at once, which is one of the reasons we had to have several reshoots. Another is that we realised that we did not have enough master shots, which was an essential continuity technique that we did not consider as much as other continuity techniques. Some elements of our shoot we planned extremely well, like our shoot schedule, which was important because of making sure that the extra actor could leave as soon as his parts were finished, and whenever we were not in shot, we could film and in our re-shoot we had we planned out exactly what shots we needed re-shoot beforehand.

All of the members of our group had used Adobe Premiere Pro before, so editing was fairly easy. Most of the trouble that we had in post-production was due to lighting and lack of footage, but these problems were solved with re-shoots and Adobe After Effects. We did also have a problem with our lack of master shots in our preliminary task, but did not have a chance to re-shoot, and because we did not need to focus on lighting in our preliminary task, these things we learnt how to fix for the first time during the making of our film opening. We also re-ordered shots very often to make certain things not look like jump cuts and get rid of small continuity errors, and had sound bridges to make our sequence have a seamless narrative.

Audience feedback video:

Our audience feedback taught me a lot about our project, like what could have been improved and what worked particularly well. From this, I learnt that our secondary and core audience would both want to watch the rest of our film because they wanted to know what happens afterwards, which is what we aimed for.

Mila, Shobnam and I are all friends, so in the pre-production of our film opening, we were able to discuss and adapt our idea very easily. We did, however, have problems with communication, which made our planning a lot harder, and the amount of work that we did individually was not even. We then learnt the importance of keeping in touch with our group and communicating any problems that we had. Overall, I am very pleased with the final product and our group in general.