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

With our preliminary task that offered us a kind of introduction to the equipment we used, and the process in order to create the final product. While going through the preliminary task I feel this is where I made mistakes and learnt from these mistakes in my final piece. I took time to improve my skills, and refine them into tune and this is the basis of my filmmaking skills.

Planning and Research

In the planning and research part of the preliminary task very little planning was done. Apart from the storyboard which was obviously the basis of the order of the preliminary task. I believe this was mainly a task to allow us to get an idea of how the equipment works and how the different shots and movements looked, and what sort of effect they gave. I feel that I have done a lot of research and planning in this final product in comparison to the preliminary task. I have looked into other films with the same genre to see what sort of shots and movements they use to create the genre effects they need, and therefore we have used some of these shots to do this also the lighting and the position of the camera. When creating ideas we all had our own and all wanted them to work. Firstly we couldn’t pick a genre to use, that was the first problem so we seeked help and got told a genre but then as we thought of ideas we changed the genre to make it more of a mystery which I found interesting to do.

Filming

When planning for the final product after doing the preliminary we now knew what the camera was able to do. After using a wide variety of different shots during the preliminary, for one we knew that the tripod was extremely hard to work and move the get the right angle when changing shots in the preliminary task I know felt more able to find new shots to explore and what effect they would have in the final product and what sort of attraction it would give to the audience as the audience was the main aspect here. When creating our storyboard and ideas, my head was exploding with different ideas to use and how they could all work together. Our first issue with our final product as well as our preliminary task was the quality of our footage due to the lack of light problems and the artificial lights were just changing the films colour, and the quality was not as good as we expected which therefore meant we had to re-film to attempt to get some better quality. This was the skill I was least sure about to start of with, as I didn’t do Media at GCSE so I was new to all the filming and how to use the camera where as the other people in my group both had done Media GCSE so I felt a little out of place to start of with.

Editing
This skill I was a little unsure about, as again I didn’t do Media for GCSE so I was very new to the software and the making stage. But now from doing my pre-preliminary task, preliminary task and final product I feel so much more confident and comfortable when editing, I feel that I could progress my skill more though as I still am lost when it comes down to the advanced facilities of Final Cut. In my preliminary task and pre-preliminary task I used more transitions and effects like slow motion and other effects where as in my final product we didn’t need to use as many of these effects, I think we used slow motion on one clip as it was tracked faster than the other clips which when on playback didn’t look right so we tried to hide this fault and it is unnoticeable now. While using these effects they have helped me enhance the use of these skills and how to make it more appealing to the audience as I say again the audience is the most important concept as without the audience it is pointless to make the film. In my future now I hope to make further developments in my filmmaking skills and to still make mistakes so I can learn from them.