Evaluation Question 7

'Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full project?'
Planning- In the preliminary film, it didn't require a lot of planning as the film was only thirty seconds long. It took around a page of story boarding and as we hadn't done it before, it didn't look professional at all. The storyboard for the film opening, however, had much more detail and was much longer. We knew the key words to use much better and this helped when it came to actually filming. We followed by the storyboard. Also, for the preliminary film we had around half an hour between the planning and filming, however, between planning for the opening and actually filming we had the space of a few weeks, which definitely helped when it came to time management and we had much more time to make detailed planning in order to make our produce as effective as possible. We had to retake many times when making the preliminary film as the bad quality camera didn't stay focused for very long and we only took a limited range of shots, and now we know how to take a much larger variety of shots and were able to name them all.
Equipment/skills- Looking at the preliminary film, there are many shaky shots which we didn't think to retake and the angles are all fairly simple and conventional, such as close-ups and mainly long shots. However, the improvement can be seen when you see the final opening because there are a larger range of shots such as worm's eye views, extra long shots, and much more. Using the better quality camera helped us to improve the film because the microphone, tripods and cameras were much better quality so the entire quality is generally better. The first film we didn't even use a tripod for most of the shots and even the change of using an iPod makes the shots much smoother and don't move awkwardly or shake.
Editing/sound- seeing as we used a much higher technology program (Premiere Pro) to edit the film opening, the editing looks much better and the sound is also much better quality. The reason for the sound being better quality was that both the camera microphone quality is much higher and we used some music online, so we didn't just have the bad quality of the microphone from the flip camera. When editing the opening, the cuts are much tighter between each one and they all run a lot smoother, and the sounds we used create a multitude of feelings for the audience, creating a more overall satisfying experience for the audience. Using the soundtrack made the film much more tense as the music helped to create suspense, and made it all tie together a lot better, compared with the preliminary film when we only used the microphone on the camera and didn't have music in the background. Also, the titles helped the film to look a lot more professional and represented the narrative very well. Most professional films you will watch contain titles that make the film fit into a specific genre and help to create tension, and I believe inserting this into the opening helps it to look much more aesthetically appealing and professional compared with the preliminary film.
Teamwork- Over making our blogs work well together and filming the opening and preliminary film together, we have learned a lot about sharing out the workload equally and making the film as good quality as possible. The only communication we had during the making of the preliminary film was in lesson, whereas we learned that using communication techniques such as facebook messaging and text messaging we found it much more effective when it came to making and editing the opening. We all shared out the responsibilities equally when it came to filming, editing, and inserting sound and titles.