Evaluation Question 7

Looking back at you preliminary task, what do you think you have you learnt in the proggression of it to the full product?

After filming our preliminary, we learnt how much planning is required for filming, and how much time is wasted when we plan the shots on set rather than preparing before hand. After our preliminary we decided to make sure that every aspect of our final production was planned thoroughly. This would ensure that we did not waste the time that we had with the hire camera, as we only had 2 days. We also learnt about the importance of lighting, and how it can add to the effect of different shots, and also the distractions it can cause. We found especially with the long shot in our preliminary, that the lighting distracted the viewer from the shot of the main character, so we did our best to choose camera angles which helped target this issue. We we also quite lucky as the weather was cloudy which didn't cause many problems with natural lighting and colouring.

Also, we made sure that we deleted the bad takes before uploading clips from the camera to the computer as after uploading files for the preliminary exercise, we found that it took a long time and the process was very slow as we had so many different takes that were useless to us.

We found after watching our preliminary and hearing feedback from the class that the lighting was too similar throughout the video which made viewers lose some interest. In our final introduction we ensured that we chose scenes that had a wide range of lighting, from high key lighting to low key lighting, daylight to night sky. We also tried to change scenery as much as possible in our final piece to keep the viewer engaged. The theme and story of the video allowed us to do this while the film maintained its flow and didn't seem erratic.

After watching our preliminary exercise back, we have learnt how essential it is to have good continuity throughout, and how distracting errors can be to the viewer. They also play a part in preventing the viewer from becoming absorbed in the film and characters and feel like they are a part of the scene, and in our film it is imperative that the viewer is connected and absorbed in the character.