To approach this, I looked at my preliminary task and all the posts I had made on my blog from then till now. I made a list of everything I had learnt and progressed in. I have put these into different subheadings and I will expand on each one individually.

Technical Skills

It’s important to keep the camera still while filming and minimise movement. To prevent this, the use of a tripod is critical, this allows you to rest the camera and take steady shots, and creates smooth pans and tilts. Also taking the shot more than once allows us to pick the best possible one, as we found out when filming our media product, when we looked back at our takes for each shot and did an edit decision list we had much more choice, compared to when I need my preliminary task I only had one or two takes of each shot therefore made it difficult.

A mistake I was making when filming, was that I left too much room at the top or sides of a shot, this took the focus away from what I was shooting as there was so much visible background.

So I improved on the framing of shots. I also

learnt about the rule of thirds, when the frame is divided into nine sections, this is to try and avoid filming the subject of the shot in the middle of the camera framing. This adds to the quality and makes the product more realistic and believable. This also helps with the composition of the media product so the audience get the best possible viewing.

When it came to the editing process we noticed a few continuity errors, which we tried to avoid during filming by keeping sure the make-up, hair, costumes and background made sense with the story. When filming my preliminary task, lots of my shots did not match and did not flow well with each other, when filming our media product, we made sure the shots of the characters opening the gate was continuous. Continuity errors take away from the realism of the media product and can make it look unprofessional and also can create confusion for the audience if it doesn’t flow properly.

I learnt how to edit shots with lighting and various effects such as transitions, also how to cut clips to fit in the film, which helps give a professional look. I learnt how to do this when practicing a lockdown shot, which is when parts of the shot is cut out.

Software

Since my preliminary task I have learnt how to use LiveType, as we needed this to make our group production logo. It was interesting to use this program as we was able to give a professional look, that we couldn’t achieve on other programs we had access to.

When we did our preliminary task, we used IMovie to put our clips together. From them we changed this to Premiere Pro as there is more tools to give us more advanced access and create an overall better media product. We could do things such as changing the volume of sound, and have more than one sound running at a time, so for our film we had the re-recorded sound of our characters dialogue and then the sound track. After YouTube tutorials, we felt

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

confident using the program.

General

Overall I have learnt that in order to make a good film, you have to plan carefully. This helps each stage of making a film so much easier to carry out, as you know what you are doing and what to do in order to get the best possible product. In comparison to doing the preliminary task, where I didn’t do any planning at all, you can see the improvement from our final film, Scarlett, where we all put a lot of time into planning a preparing what we were going to do.

Another strong learning point is to re shoot, as many things can go wrong with a shot such as the angling, framing and lighting. When doing the preliminary task I hardly did any takes of shots, compared to the final film when we did the same shot many times in different angles to give us the best possible shot and quality to our film. From doing this we had a more professional and easier time when editing in terms of having a lot of choice of different shots.