Question 7 of Evaluation

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

Prelim task Brief: To create a continuity sequence 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 exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.

Final task Brief: The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.

As you can see, we were given a lot more freedom in our final brief, which allowed us to experiment with different film conventions and expand on our own ideas for an opening sequence for a film.

Learning curve:

There were some differences on how my respective groups went about planning our two short clips. The main differences between our prelim videos and our final ones are that the planning was much more structured for our opening sequence; we used a more advanced storyboard, a longer script, a shooting schedule and we had a longer time frame to work with. Also, throughout the research for the final sequence, I learnt more about different theorists and conventions of film. I have definitely progressed from the beginning of the year because this is the first year I have ever had of being taught Media.

Storyboard

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Our final storyboard was much more comprehensive, and there was a lot more planning involved. Also, for our final idea, we changed the entire plot after taking filming and doing a rough edit on our footage. We decided that the plot wouldn’t work with the time and realistic constraints we had to deal with. We decided to keep the horror genre, but decided to follow the conventions more. The storyboard was a quick and easy method of drafting up a new idea and estimating how realistic it would be to shoot. In our prelim task, we were not faced with this issue, and the storyboard was more for experience than necessity.

Script

Media Script and Schedule Prelim

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Group 6 Script 2

As you can see, our final script was more dynamic, and we even added more onto it for a greater effect after the blackout part. This meant that as a group, we developed our script writing skills in greater depth than previously to make sure that the final sequence was as realistic as possible.

 Shooting schedule

Within the prelim task, the shooting schedule was useful, but contrasted greatly to the necessity of it during our final editing. Without it we would have taken a lot longer capturing our footage on Premiere Pro, and this would have limited the amount of editing time that we had. It was also useful during the shoots as a reference to what we had not yet filmed, so there was less of a chance of needing to reshoot.

Improvements:

There biggest issue that I had with our final footage was the blackout. This corresponds to our audience feedback as well; many people wrote that the blackout was either too long, or that there should have been some form of lighting within it. Ideally, we would have doen this, but an issue involving the availability of our primary actress meant that we were unable to film any more footage so the blackout had to remain pitch black.

I also feel that the sequence could have been more exciting. By trying to follow the conventions and not make the film so complex that we were unable to finish it again, I feel that we did not exploit the full potential of the task. I feel that there was not much more we could have done in the time constraints, but if we were to redo the shoot, I would like to experiment with different ways of making the scene more suspense-filled so that the blackout scene had more of an impact upon the audience and drew them in more readily.