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

Working on our prelim was the first chance we got to work on a project as a group, and this was good practice for the communication and teamwork skills necessary to create a successful project.

Demonstrating excellent organisational skills.

From our prelim, I feel I have learnt much more about camera and editing techniques, as well as use of costume and setting to create an appropriate mise-en-scene for the genre. It was very apparent how organised and prepared you needed to be on a shoot, in order to maintain continuity, and ensure all the essential shots were filmed. For this we had to write down exactly what needed to be filmed, and we then had to make note of what we had done, how and any issues that arose. Any gaps in this knowledge would lead to an inconsistent film, which would be very difficult to edit, and may have required a full re shoot to rectify. We learnt how important use of mise-en-scene was, as this could communicate an entire personality to the audience, and for this we had to be much more exact in our locations, props and costumes. These has to then be recorded in order to maintain continuity throughout.





All the camera and editing software used was the same, however we progressed from using a PAG light in the prelim, to using a more advanced lighting kit. This was far more advanced, and gave us much greater control over the lighting.
We had to learn various technique in order to create the right lighting effects in our film, as we needed the light to appear natural, and diverse. To accomplish this effect, we pointed the lights towards the ceiling, or a wall, in order to bounce light around the room, thus lightening the whole room, rather than using a direct beam, which would have left us with harsh shadows, which would not have been appropriate for our style or genre.

We were unable to film any shots of the two characters together.

Spacial constraints clear in these shots.

An improvement we would have made in our prelim, would have been a greater variety in shot framing and angles, this was difficult during our prelim as we were filming within a small confined space. In our film, we filmed in a much larger environment, so we were able to capture a variety of different angles and framing in our shots, and we used a combination of these throughout our opening. Another issue was the acting, which is something I feel we greatly improved in our opening, as we had much more time to practice  as well as a wider range of actors to choose from. Our actors were comfortable around us, and easy to work with, as they were both part of our group, and this greatly benefited us when instructing and offering criticism and suggestions. I learnt a great deal from the prelim, and the problems I encountered and knowledge I gained from it was put to further use in our film opening.

Our legnthly selection process led to our choice of these two actresses.