Evaluation 7

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

Our prelim task prepared us for shooting a continuous running narrative that had to make sense and contain events and action.

Below is our prelim video which we made to practice creating a continuity sequence. Ours was called 'The G' and we needed to include techniques like match-on-action and reverse shots.




Planning

In our prelim we learned how we were supposed to properly and successfully plan a short clip. We learned how to draw out a clear and useful storyboard which would actually help us throughout the production stage. We also realised we had to have a script to fall back on as we learned the hard way that if we had to re-shoot we said different things at the different shoots. Then once we had both of these we needed to create a shot-list for the actual shoot. This contained the type of shots we use, the dialogue in the shot, the length of the shot and all the shots order. We realised that we wouldn't have been able to cope without this and was the most important thing on the shoot day.

Technologies

As I have said in the previous question we used lots of different technologies in our production. We first used all of the basic techniques like cutting, dragging, fades and stitches in our prelim. These techniques made a base for the more complex ones that we used in our final media product.

Techniques:

Match-on-action:
We learned how to use this in our prelim by matching shots of opening doors and people sitting down. This gave us a sense of continuous motion and making everything seem fluid. In our actual media product we had to use match-on-action for the walking through the forest. This meant we had to take all the shots all the way through from each angle so we could edit them together at the correct places.

180 degree rule:
We struggled with this in the prelim task but we learnt from our problems and ended up using the rule to our advantage to get shots from the angle we wanted. At 0:36 in our opening sequence we needed to have our next shot from a certain side. This meant we had to have the camera cross the 180 degree line mid way through the shot. We could then have the camera on the right side of Maran when he looks in his binoculars.


Cross-cutting:
For our prelim we needed this to cut between the two characters, to show that two things are happening at the same time. For our media product we had to cross-cut between the zombies and the protagonists. This meant that we were able to shoot each shot seperatley and then just time them correctly in the edit. This gave us more freedom which made things easier.