Evaluation Q7

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

Before starting out final Project, we were given a Preliminary task which allowed us to become familiar with the type of equipment we would be using (Cameras, Tripods) as well as introducing us to software such as Final Cut Pro and devices like the Mac Computer. Our Preliminary was a continuity task involving a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down into a chair opposite another character, with whom he then exchanges some lines of dialogue with before then exiting the room, within this clip we should have exhibited and demonstrated match on action, shot reverse shot and the 180- Degree rule. I believe that since making this at the beginning of the year I have learnt so much and I am much more confident with handling film equipment and I  also have a lot more knowledge on editing and various types of software.

Below is the link to our preliminary task and after watching and reviewing it back as well as comparing it to our final product I can see how much of a difference this year has made and how much it has improved.

First of all, I think that our organisation for this task was quite poor with no assigned roles or any real preparation made. This meant that our preliminary took longer than initially expected. We made sure that in our full film that we would be much more prepared and we assigned each member of our group to a specific task during the production of our film, for example, Darren mainly wrote the script whereas Callum focused on the editing aspect of our film.

It can also be seen that the cuts are quite jumpy and this makes it noticeable by the audience that the cuts are present, this takes away from the realism of the scene and this meant that in our final film we would have had to pay more attention to this aspect of editing.

However, Other than this, We found the overall preliminary to be quite successful, With us correctly displaying shot reverse shot (11-15 seconds), match on action (17-24 seconds) as well as not breaking the 180 degree rule. We also used a close-up on the door handle which worked effectively for showing the audience the action that's occurring on screen, we incorporated this into our final film.

Because lighting was no real problem in our preliminary, It meant we paid no attention to this factor in our final film, which proved to be costly as it can be seen throughout the film, especially towards the end the lighting gets slightly darker, this is because our final few shots were filmed when it became dark.

How we improved/ How we did things differently

In our final film, we had a lot more time to film in comparison to our Preliminary as this was a one day task, and we were limited to one of the rooms within college, The room we chose was good as it was on a relatively quiet corridor, which was beneficial for preventing extraneous variables outside our film that may have effected continuity. The lighting was okay however there wasn't much we could do about this. In our final film, We decided to enforce our initial idea of having a quiet environment by booking our our main room for our groups use only, This meant that we could get the shots we wanted in a much faster time. We could also take with us props and actors in our film whereas we couldn't do this for our preliminary. 

In conclusion, I think that we have mainly improved on our editing and this was due to the amount of time we had to become better at final cut pro, This can be easily seen when comparing the cuts in our preliminary compared to our final film. The use of actors and props also influenced the overall look of our film. We used a wider variety of shots and editing techniques that we had picked up on through the use of research and through looking at the various conventions of zombie horror.