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?

Our preliminary task and final product are undoubtedly worlds apart.

One of the main contributing factors to this is the timeframes in which we completed them both; our preliminary task was completed inside of a few days whilst our final product has taken us months.

During this time we have gone from picking the first idea suggested and just going out and shooting it completely spontaneously to spending time researching genres, planning out characters, and storyboarding different ideas.

This really helped us to refine our final product whereas we simply did not have time for this with our preliminary task.

Fortunately we didn’t have any continuity errors in either our preliminary task or final product as both were filmed on single days with no major events happening during the filming of each.

Thanks to the time we had for preparation we had managed to create various things, such as a storyboard, script, shotlist and such, which aided us in completing the filming of our final product swiftly; the absence of this was not an issue with our preliminary task thankfully as we needed far less footage and almost everything was improv.

When filming our preliminary task we couldn’t really film extra shots as there wasn’t many that we were sure that we wanted, however when filming our final product we ensured that we filmed way too much and often kept the camera on in-between shots (which actually led to the piggyback shot).

Our preliminary task was also my first experience in directing, and so I feel my confidence was somewhat unmotivating, however by the time we had completed this and our Resevoir Dogs opening re-make I feel that I had adapted to the role well and I can only hope that this is reflected in our final product.

Unfortunately we had to use quite an old camera for our prelimary task with an inbuilt mic and so the image and audio quality left some to be desired. However, with our final product we used a rather lovely Nikon DSLR with a Rode mic, and so image and audio quality was much improved.

Editing was another stage in which we greatly improved; with our preliminary task we only spent a maximum of 2 hours editing, however our final product has had a ton of time put into it editing, with a great deal of refinements and changes being implemented along the way.

Whilst editing our preliminary task none of us had used iMovie before, and so we were learning on the fly; however with our final product we’d had a lot more experience.

Overall I’m extremely happy with the progress I’ve made from our preliminary task to final product and that I have learnt a great deal; the overall quality is far better, the planning was far more meticulous and thought out, the ideas were refined.

I’ve now had the pleasure of directing 3 film openings and helping to edit all three, with which I feel that I have learnt a great deal about film and video production.