Our finished production

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?

Earlier on during this course we had a preliminary task to show the new skills we had learnt with the camera and editing software. The things I learnt during the preliminary task started with the making of storyboards to plan out the shots types and what would be able to be seen in the shots, but to do this we needed to learn shot types like shot reverse shot, which is used to capture conversations between characters

                                        

As you can see from this picture, camera one captures the medium shot of the two characters and camera two will capture everything the man says with camera three captures everything the women says. Then during editing, the two sets of footage will be merged to create a shot reverse shot scene where the camera swaps the image from the male to the female and back again when necessary. And while on the subject of shot reverse shot, we also learnt the about the 180 degree rule, which is shown on the diagram by camera X , when shooting shot reverse shot it is important to never cross the hypothetical 180 degree line. This line allows cameras to go anywhere around the front of the line, but not the back so that during play back it doesn’t confuse the audience by jumping all over the set and changing camera angle.

Another I think I learnt about was match on action, with is where the camera will take a shot of something then it will change to a closer shot of the action happening. For example in this picture there is a medium shot of a person, going to scan his card. Then shows a close up on this card being scanned.

Theses skills I had learnt, imputed into my main production a lot, as I was the director, I chose specific camera angles to set the mood and scene how I required. For example, I used a close up on the barrel of the sniper to put the audience in a feel of danger, therefore tensing the mood.

Another technique I used that I learnt from my preliminary task is use of the arch shot, including the 180 degree rule. We used an arch shot around the sniper but didn’t cross the 180 degree line.

I found that during the preliminary task that the creativity in shot types and angles was something I found easy and enjoyed. For example the positioning the people to show different things was easy and was enjoyable, so for our main production I included lots of different shot types and creative positioning such as the “looking down the sniper” shot. However when doing the preliminary task I realised that I disliked dialogue during as scene as it can spoil the mood but also it is difficult to work with, in relation to background noise and actors ability in some cases. So we tried to minimise dialogue in our man production, giving more mood and feel to the production.

I found that research and planning was developed in our main production from the preliminary task by the use of shooting schedules in our main production. These important pieces of paperwork were the timetables we would keep to during the filming process; however these weren’t needed during the preliminary task because we filmed all three preliminary tasks in an hour.

I also found that during construction we had developed our skills since the preliminary task by gaining more experience with the cameras and the sound equipment. This is because we had several full days used with them rather that the 20 mins while we film the preliminary task.

For the evaluation, I found that my skills have developed further by my main production evaluation being more detailed to match the increased length of the produced, rather than a 15 second preliminary task.