Evaluation Question 7 - What Have We Learnt From the Preliminary Task

Evaluation Question 7 - What Have We Learnt From the Preliminary Task 

Our preliminary task helped us to understand how improve our film opening in a number of ways. Without the preliminary task, we probably would have had a number of mistakes in our film opening which we couldn't afford to have.

The preliminary task helped us to establish that we would need to take pictures of where we started our filming in case we needed to shoot a specific section of the scene again. This was in case anything was moved or changed during the meantime and would allow us not to make any continuity editing mistakes. This really did help us out during the editing of our film opening as it allowed us to cut between two shots of the same section to get the best, overall shot.

Another problem we discovered was the height of the tripod. If we had to re-shoot certain sections of our film opening we would need to make a note of how high the tripod was at each section to get the smoothest camera work we can. This allowed us to come back and re film due to the fact we did make those notes when it came to our final task filming.

Props are another key aspect of our filming that we needed to take note of. In each scene, we realised we would need to take a note of each object in the room and whereabouts in the room it was. This was in case we re shot a scene or wanted to put it in a different angle. This allowed us to re-shoot if we needed to and made sure the props didn't just jump from one side of the room to the other.

We also established that the location of our filming was very very important for a number of reasons. First of all, the location we chose to film in would need to be appropriate to pick up and cancel our specific sounds. If we chose to shoot indoors, we would need to make sure it was nice and quiet to make sure there wasn't any ambient sound to disrupt our filming. This is in case the intrusive sound overpowers our dialogue and causes the sound recorded to be unclear. This was discovered in our preliminary task when a classroom next door were quite loud and their audio could be heard over the protagonists synchronous diegetic sound.
The next reason the location is important is due to the plot itself. We don't want a location that is going to confuse or overwhelm our audience as this will make them switch off. This is why we chose to film our opening sequence in two different locations. We wanted to leave the audience with enigma codes to keep them wanting to watch more.
Finally, the lighting. The lighting was a very important aspect when it came to picking our location. Obviously, it is quite difficult and expensive to obtain light stands which are genuinely used on set to create a well lit environment so we needed to choose locations with a lot of natural light. That is why we filmed most of our opening sequence in a woods as it was outdoors and had a lot of natural light.

Overall, the preliminary task really helped us not to make these mistakes and think carefully about what we are planning to film before we just jump straight in.