Evaluation Question 7

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

 

Preliminary Task Brief

Produce a continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom he/she then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. The taskshould demonstrate match on action, shot / reverse shot and the 180-degree-rule.

Main Task Brief

The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum  two minutes. All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candiadate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source.

 

Pre-production stage

We learnt from the preliminary the utmost importance of full scripting and storyboarding, doing location scouting and securing the locations and actors well in advance of our shoots. Problems such as leaking sound from other rooms during the prelim task made us realise that you really cannot just film whenever and wherever you want; it requires permission and much planning.

After the prelim task raised several issues in regards to getting the shots we needed, we decided for our real project that we would do some test shoots for certain sequences in our film. This helped us iron out and work around impracticalities or difficulties which would arise during the real shoot, saving us time and effort.

Here is a video of a test shoot we made, to help us fully visualize and plan our second shoot for 'Mute':

Production stage

The preliminary task focused on continuity, and it made us realise just how much attention needs to be paid to continuity throughout the entire process of constructing our sequence. It is very difficult to create a continuity perfect sequence, as we discovered with the prelim, but giving us some practise at it really helped our final sequences seem as slick and professional as possible. However, we still encoutered some continuity issues with our sequence:

A continuity error in our sequence

The prelim task also showed us how long it really can take to fully complete a shoot. It takes a huge amount of time and cooperation between you and your team, and you need to find an equilibrium between all your creative inputs and your practicalities.

We also learnt from the prelim task that it is necessary to alternate between the various production roles. This allows you to develop experience in directing, producing, acting, lighting, using the camera etc. Because of this, as a group we worked together to ensure everyone was allowed to explore the different fields of production as much as possible; while still creating a polished and successful sequence.

Post Production

From the prelim task, we were extremely limited in our amount of editing time; we only had about an hour to edit it together. However, it was much more basic- the soundtrack and dialogue were very simple, it was only a minute long, and contains no fast paced action. Also, it was all shot within one room, meaning good continuity was easy to maintain as we kept the room exactly the same throughout the shoot.

It showed me just how long the editing process can take, and that you always need to allow much more time that you think is necessary. It also helped us understand how hard it is to create a seamless flowing narrative with limited editing time. Because of this we gave ourselves as much time as we could to edit our sequence together- more time means a higher quality product.

Here is a shot of our group working across the different stages of production: