Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you think you have learnt from the progression from it to the full task ?

Looking back at the preliminary task, In my opinion, I’d say there has been a large improvement from this right up to the main task. We learnt various skills whilst producing the preliminary task and then we applied them to our final piece. We did make some mistakes in the preliminary but, it was better to make the mistakes then, than to make the same mistakes in the final piece.

Firstly, the main mistake we made in the preliminary task was, crossing the invisible line. This is where a character is on the left on the previous shot then, appears to be on the opposite side in the next shot. This happened when Jordan and I were speaking about the mobile phone. We didn’t really take this into account when doing our final piece because, as we had for the majority of the piece, the one person, we didn’t see how we could cross the line.Secondly, during the preliminary, we removed the camera from the tripod. Not that this was a mistake, however, this created an unsteady camera view when we watched it back. Even though we knew the risks of filming without a tripod, we decided that for our main task, we would proceed to do so. The reason for this is that, having an unsteady camera creates a sense of urgency that suits our piece immensely.

There were various skills that we interpreted from the preliminary task, despite the mistakes we made. We decided to take some of the various shots we learnt and interpret them into our final piece. We used a number of different shots and decided that no shot would last longer than six seconds. The reason for this was, the shots changing quickly would keep up the pace of the film opening. Referring back to the preliminary, we only had one long shot of Jermaine walking through the main doors. We identified that having more long shots would ‘space-out’ our piece and tidy it up in a sense that, not all the shots were as close together.

The main factor that I learnt how to do in this course was, editing. To edit our piece we used the program Final Cut Pro. In our preliminary there was a shot were I(Jermaine) walked through the canteen doors, however, we filmed the shot from one side of the door then, filmed from inside the canteen. When we came to edit this, we realised that it is really difficult to make the shots match because, I had opened the door in a different way the second time. Moreover, we had to film the shot of me walking through the door a couple of times because the window at the side revealed people walking past. When thinking of ideas for our main task we decided to film in an alley because, we wouldn’t be distracted by other people. This meant all our shots would match because, everything would still be in place from previous shots.