Part 8- Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Above is my preliminary task of making short clip called 'The Encounter'. This was made right at the beginning of the year and i think i have made a lot of progress since then in terms of my use of digital technology, creativity and post production.

In my preliminary task i think there was quite a bit of it that was successful in terms of camera work and shot types especially as it had been quite long since i had held a camera and my knowledge on everything was a bit rusty.The idea was originally my partner Kieran's idea however i did direct it and did come up with the shots and when we should use techniques such as match on action. The match on action and the POV shot worked quite well in my opinion. The match on action is shown below. This is seen at 00:11.

The match on action on the left was seen at 00:11 in my preliminary task whilst on the right is the match on action used in my BSR opening sequence at 01:24. The match on action used in the BSR was much more fluid and shows that in terms of editing i have improved quite a bit. We had used the same programme to edit on meaning my skills on iMovie had improved a lot since the first time i used it. Also when we edited in the BSR we had matched it well with music and everything was timed. There was more research and planning that went into our BSR opening sequence as we had much more time to use wisely. If we hadn't had done our preliminary task then our BSR would not have been as good as it is right now.

360 track going around the table

The creativity aspect in this task was done quite well as our time limit on this was around a minute only and to fit in a whole meet and dialogue and different camera shots is quite a bit, so when it came to creativity it worked as we only used specific shots that were essential to the piece and we also used two shots at 00:44 where Kieran was ordering the food and then we cut to my facial expression whilst he continued talking. This was pretty creative as it showed my reaction as well as still being able to hear Kieran. We had done this by filming Kieran talking and then filming my expression whilst he talked but he had to use the same tone. Also the fact that thinking of this idea was quite easy as it actually was based on a true story that happened to me. This carried on throughout to when making the BSR as i had original ideas to incorporate into the production which made it more creative such as the 360 track which happened in the first minute of production.

The skills we had to use on iMacs and the programmes on it had improved greatly as in the BSR we used different programmes like Livetype and we also used different transitions; but as we had used the main programme iMovie before we were more used to it and this helped us a lot when it came to time as we did not have to learn everything again when making the BSR. Also making the preliminary task showed us how boring it can really be when you do not add a variety of camera angles. Due to this in my BSR we did take camera angles into account which made it more interesting. This was seen at 01:33.

Low angle shot used in my BSR to show superiority.

We were more free to do what we wanted in the encounter as the brief wasn't as strict as we weren't limited in the genre section but we still conformed to the BSR conventions. All the shots and editing used in the preliminary task were very abrupt and tacky when they were not supposed to be. However in my final BSR product everything was done more professionally and we conveyed the emotion we need to put over to the audience via the editing and camera shots.

Next year i would set a target for myself of making sure i film earlier rather than later as this time around everything was tight as we had filmed a week before deadline day so we need to make a plan and actually stick to it.