Evaluation

Unfortunately I didn’t do GCSE media and was therefore at a disadvantage when it came to knowing about; shot sizes, the location recce and script writing however doing the preliminary has allowed me to learn and develop these skills.

Whilst we were doing the pre-production we as a team had to learn to communicate and find out everyone’s strengths and weakness’s which was difficult as we all had different ideas and ways of working but turned out all right as we all had different  strengths and so we could help each other out if we needed to . We did find working together a bit of a challenge as we all had different views and each person took what we were doing with different attitudes but we always discussed everyone’s ideas and let them have a say, which was great when it came to getting creative trying to find out a unique and original idea.

 During the task I learnt that there are many risks whilst filming and watching for continuity, by doing a risk assessment at the place of filming I managed to evaluate everything that could go wrong  so when it actually came to filming there was no risk of someone or equipment getting damaged.  

 I think that overall we have met the aims of the assessment with the continuity and group work. Before starting to shoot we practiced shooting something with good continuity to understand how it worked and that we knew what we were expected to do. During the rehearsals it was difficult for everyone to keep focused at times and with filming it became obvious that you have to be very organized.  We got there in the end and for the next task I will work hard to get other people in my group to keep focused.

Editing looked quite complicated but having had a go I felt I picked it up quite quickly.  I will look forward to the next task to sharpen my skills.

Team work is all important, from having the right clothes on for a shot and then wearing the same the next day to making sure we could all meet up to edit and make use of our editing time. Planning was very important as we needed a clear idea of what we were doing at all times.  The planning we did enabled us to film quite quickly.

Looking back over the finished product of our preliminary task I realised that we had not stuck to our script completely as we had problems remembering it in such a short space of time so this could perhaps be a target for me to work on, another target could be to vary camera shots as there were groups of certain shots together which meant we didn’t show a range of shots or the skill needed to shoot them. For our next shoot we also need to work on the pre-production work and make sure it is ready before shooting. I also want to improve my skills at the software programme Adobe Premiere, I feel it has a lot to offer and would like to experiment with colour, editing styles and sound.

Story board and Shot list

We used the story board to plan our shot list and to work out how we were going to film our film.

Post Production Report

Post production we went to the editing suit and logged on.  We downloaded our footage.  Rather than downloading each clip (rush) we captured all of the shots in one.  This meant we had to then watch through the film and take out each clip that we wanted.  We found the software quite difficult to start with at the beginning but soon got the hang of it.  We were able to put together our film quite quickly at this stage.

Having edited our film we had a series of rushes that we named numerically, we then put these on the timeline and started to build up our film.
We used a combination of hard cuts and fades as transitions.  In places we had some continuity problems and we used fades here to try and hide some of the mistakes, we should have re shot some scenes but with absences we decided to use what we had.
We decided against using music as we struggled to find non copyright songs that suited the film.

We put our countdown and bars and end credits on the production and watched it through with our teacher and other members of the class.  We didn't use an opening title as we didn't think we needed a name for what we had done as it wasn't a complete film.  We made several changes to the rushes after this to get the continuity right in view of what our class members and teacher said. In the end we were quite pleased with what we had produced despite the few small errors.