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

Before starting our starting our film opening we had to do a prelim task. This task helped us brush up on our already existing film making skills as well as develop new techniques which we would apply to our film opening. 

Task for the prelim:

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 he/she then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.

Task for opening sequence:

To produce a 2 minute opening sequence for a fiction film. It must have titles throughout, copyright-free soundtrack, understanding of continuity editing and clear generic signifies.

 


The whole process we went through for our prelim task was fairly similar as what we went through for our opening sequence, however it was was the depth we went into and the amount time we spent on each factor which were different.

Time was very limited for our prelim task, although we never had a lot of time for our opening sequence we did have enough to time carefully thoroughly think through everything and aim for perfection with our final product.

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In the video below I talk about our prelim, highlight some of the similarities and differences between this and the opening sequence. I will also talk about the whole editing process.

With our prelim we only had one chance to get the all the shots we needed, whereas with our opening sequence we were able to go for re-shoots therefore our shots were better and well planned.

We didn't really consider a target audience for our prelim as our main focus was to exhibit a variety of different skills when it came to shooting and editing. We simply came up with a topic, shot list, storyboard and script. This was also due to the time we had, it was limited and we didn't want to give ourselves too much to do. However, having showed a few people, they all liked the twist with ‘the G’. With the opening sequence audience was one of the highest priorities, as we ensured everything we did would appeal to them. After a screening I did myself, I got the people to fill out a questionnaire from which we received highly positive comments; this showed we had been successful with our audience research.  

Team Work

As a team we all worked well, we evenly distributed jobs and we were all very efficient when it came to completing them. There were hiccups during the course of this project, things didn't according to plan, however as a team we managed to overcome these issues- for example we had to shoot 3 days after school in a row to ensure we'd have all our shots in time for editing, and in order to do this we had to make sacrifices which we all did. Sometimes we did disagree with each other, but I think this helped us get the best final product we could as this meant we clearly thought about everything we did such as the idea, editing, music, effects etc.



As a film maker I think I have developed in confidence and skill. The process of both these tasks have made me think about and understand the whole film making process and what you have to consider. I have understood how important things like location, costume, script and so on are, as well as the technical side such as the editing techniques like match on action and transitions are. The fact our prelim wasn't perfect was arguably the biggest factors contributing to the quality of our film opening. We knew what we had to look out for and where our weaknesses were, therefore we were able to rectify it. For example, match on action, we knew the key and minute details we had to look out for, which we did for our opening.