Preliminary task Evaluation

Written by Jake and Caitlin,

In the planning and preparation for our preliminary task I felt that our group worked well with the task in hand. When we did the story boards we chose the script we wanted and each story boarded one for it and then came together as a group and decided on the best one for camera angles and settings. Once we had decided on the story board we went off to find a good location and any props we would need for the scene and script we had selected. I think we got organised well once we had all of our ideas and equipment ready, the hardest part of organising was to be able to find a perfect set to shoot in, we ended up in one of the conference rooms in the sixth form centre. When filming we practised shot reverse shot, continuity, 180 degrees rule and over shoulder shots. Making an 'action' shot using continuity was easy to shoot but harder to edit – we did 2 shots one outside and one inside so It follows the person from outside the room to the inside (between 13 seconds in to the film and 18 seconds) With our filming the only way to have improved would have been to use a tripod to reduce camera shake in certain shots.

The acting in the film was hard to do as we didn't have anyone in our group to act, we found some people to act out scenes but they didn't get the “emotions” correct for the type of film we were trying to make, we ended up using people from our group as the actors as we new the correct emotion to use in the dialogue sections, our acting was okay but it could have been improved as it was quite wooden and plane.

The editing was hard to start with as we had problems with uploading from the cam corder to the macs but because of the format we recorded it in it wouldn't work on 'final cut express' so we used apples software 'Imovie'. When we got the video clips from the cam corder we loaded them into the library of I movie, selecting the clips that were best. We then played around with the clips, putting them in order, and cropping clips to make sure the continuity was correct. This process was quite easy once we got used to the software, so we then experimented with different effects on our clips, including the sound of rain to help set the scene and create a more dramatic atmosphere. We tried an echoing affect during the phone call by detaching and moving audio, in the future, if we were to use this effect I would spend ore time making sure it was accurate and has good timing. We also played around with the camera affects making the clips darker and more contrasted, then we experimented with using text. During the editing we had a few problems with the audio from the original clips being moved or deleted, so parts of the conversation have missing audio. If we were to spend more time on this task we would of replaced the audio and made sure the speech could be heard.

Overall I think our group worked well on this task, the filming was successful, but in the future we would definitely use a tripod to reduce any shaking. We would also have to have more planning in the future, for location, dates of filming and actors. This task has helped us practice the shot reverse shot, 180 degrees rule and over the shoulder shots and continuity editing. During this task we have also learnt how to use Imovie and it has helped us get an idea of what effects we could use on our video.