Opening Sequence Evaluation Q7

Q7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

There was a big difference between our preliminary task and with our main task. Our brief for our preliminary task was to ‘Film and edit a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character. A couple of lines of dialogue must then be exchanged between characters & match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule should be demonstrated.’ Our main task was to produce ‘the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes (all video and audio material must be original, produced by candidates, with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source).’

I will begin by discussing the pre production in my preliminary task. Our initial idea to film for our preliminary task was to have a football manager talking to a member of his team and asking him to ‘fix a match’ as the manager was in desperate need of some money. The player then shakes hands with the manager and the audience see that the entire conversation was filmed on CCTV. We produced a treatment, story board, script, shooting schedule, and a timetable for the time of filming. We did the same for our main task as we produced a treatment, script, storyboard, photo storyboard, location recce, cast list, shooting schedule, rehearsals and a timetable for the day. We found that at the time of shooting our preliminary task we didn’t have enough time as we had not planned properly. Although we produced a shooting schedule we did not allocate enough time for each shot to be filmed. If we were to stick to our shooting schedule we would have had to rush through our filming meaning our shots would have been bad and of poor quality. Therefore we did as much as we could do in the time that we had. This was not enough time to complete all the filming therefore we had to run over to another day and continue filming. After experiencing this I have realised that planning is a very large part of filming as it sets out what needs to be done and within what time limits. Therefore for our main task we made sure that we had set enough time for each shot to be filmed including extra time if any mistakes had been made that meant reshooting.

During the production stage of our preliminary task we set up all the equipment we needed as well as got the cast together, arranged the set and filmed our shots. This was similar to our main task as we set up all the equipment, got our cast together, designed our set and filmed our shots including cut aways, filming a variety of shots and reshooting. When going through the post production stage of our preliminary task we realised that we had made a few mistakes. This was mainly due to not framing shots properly and getting objects in the shot that we didn’t want to be there. Therefore when filming our main task we needed to make sure that multiple shots were taken just in case mistakes had been made in previous ones. Also, we needed to make sure that a variety of shots were taken including cut aways. This was so that if any of our story-boarded shots had gone wrong we would shots that we could replace them with. Unfortunately, although we did this in our production stage of our main task we had not carried this out adequately. Due to our dim lighting we were unable to see the mistakes we had made when filming which meant that we had only realised this when in our post production stage. In some cases we had to reshoot some of the shots that were unable to be replaced by other shots. After learning that we needed to change this after carrying out our preliminary task I think that if we had the opportunity to do this task again we would perform much better as we would have learnt from our mistakes even further.

In our post production stage of our preliminary task we needed to make sure that we left enough time for all our editing to be done. I think that in our preliminary task we did this adequately as we finished the editing process in the correct time that we had set for it. However I think that in our main task we took too long to complete the editing process. This meant that we needed to spend a lot of time outside of lesson hours to complete this. In my opinion I think we took far too long to finish the editing which is definitely a lesson learned for the next time we need to do a task like this. In our preliminary task we did not use any music however in our main task we did. Originally the music was to be produced by myself using software that was available for me to use in the music department. The production of this music began too late. This was because so much time had to spent on completing the editing. Because of this the music was not originally produced by myself and we had to use it from a copyright free website. The next time music needs to be produced I will make sure I leave enough time for it to be made and I would make sure the timetable for the post production process is followed. When incorporating feedback from others in both tasks I think my group performed well as we listened to others suggestions and changed our work so that it was improved.

Heena