Media Main Task 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?

As a result of our preliminary task we really became aware of the 180-degree rule, as we broke it twice without realising. We had to do a conversation between two people, but because in our prelim the two people were so far away from eachother, we had trouble remembering what side we had filmed the shot from. We also made sure we were very aware of continuity, and making sure costume, hair and set were the same in each shot. This was because when filming our prelim, we had complications when scouting locations. We first started filming in one location, but then when we had to film again, this location was occupied. We then had to find another location, and the one we found looked nothing like the original location, so we had to do the best we could to hide the fact that we had drastically changed locations. We wanted to prevent this happening because we knew how bad it made our prelim look, so we made sure that we had definite confirmation for filming at our chosen location, and to also help with costume, hair and set continuity, we brought along one of our friends to be in charge of making sure all shots looked as similar as they could. When watching the footage back, there were a very little number of continuity errors, and these were only noticeable to us because we were the ones who created and filmed it. We didn’t make any drastic continuity errors, which showed that we had learned from our mistakes made when creating and filming our prelim. As a group, we were all pleased with how we have all progressed, and we all feel that in comparison to our prelim, we have really improved with our camera and filming technique, and we also feel we have all developed creative flare. As one of our shots we created ourselves, as it wasn’t a generic shot you’d expect to see.
Our main task is a lot better than our prelim in a number of ways. When editing our prelim, we found that we made the initial concept seem much more complicated than it was supposed to be, and this was because we were worrying too much about making the story funny, and we were treating it as if it were the main task. So, in comparison to our prelim, our storyline and screenplay was a lot stronger and made more sense, and even proved to be very humorous. Another way our main task is better than our prelim is that our shots varied. We displayed a variety of different shots in comparison to our prelim, where we used only a few use any handheld shots, and there wasn’t much creativity within the shots. Whereas, in our main task, we showed our developed creativity by filming the shot where the camera comes from behind the computer screen to reveal Babs reading an email, and we also showed our range of shots by having our opening shot as a tracking shot, and also by having a panning shot and a few point of view shots. As a group, we really wanted to explore as many different shots as we could, so when we were at the stage of storyboarding, we spent a bit of time discussing and contemplating alternatives. It was really useful for all of us to try out all of these new shots we hadn’t been able to use in our prelim-but then again, at the editing stages, this went against us as we had a hard time cutting out shots we spent time filming. Another way was that we were able to use other elements that we hadn’t explored or been able to include in our prelim, for example, we got to use voice over’s-we wrote the script, recorded them, and then placed them in our piece of film. This instantly made our main task feel more like an actual piece of film, because we had the voice over, which was one of the key elements of our genre. One more way that our task is better is due to the fact that we were able to use credits in a way that we didn’t use them in our prelim, as in our prelim, we used them quite generically, but we had to think about other ways to put in credits, because this wasn’t a complete piece of film like the prelim was-this was the first 2 minutes to the opening of a film. We were very detailed in our choices for the credits, as we discussed how the credits to transition in and out of the shots, and we even discussed what the correct font and colour scheme was for our main task also.
My group and I would have liked to have had a more seductive type of music, for the seduction scene, even though we felt that the music we ended up with did still convey the right effect, we did have a preferred song in mind but we simply didn’t have time to find and put into our film. We were still content and pleased with the music we chose though, as it did still portray a comedic seduction, and helped to heighten the comedy. Another thing in our main task that we could have improved on would probably be our light consistency, because some shots appear darker than others, and this makes one of the shots hard to see when watching the film. We did a low angles shot, and this show appears darker than all of the other shots in the film-but because this shot is only short, it doesn’t make too much of a difference. Overall we were all very pleased with the outcome of our main task, and also very pleased with how well received it was with the people who watched it.