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

Our preliminary task involved filming and editing a scene in which a character entered a room and converses with another character. This task was mainly to get us used to using the skills we would need to make a film. We needed to learn many different angles and shots as to get an idea of how a film is made and how we could replicate this. We had to use various shots and techniques such as match on action, shot reverse shot and the 180 degree rule. We also had to learn many other pre production skills like writing a script for our scene, storyboarding so we had a rough idea of what shots we were going to use. We then had to learn to edit our scene together so it ran smoothly as a normal scene. All this helped develop a sense of continuity within what we did and helped us know what we would need to film our own, two minute film clip. Overall, this generally went very well.

Our main task, creating the opening two minutes of a horror film also went very well when we used the techniques we learnt during our preliminary task. We used both match on action and shot reverse shot within our own film successfully thanks to this, we also managed to obey the 180 degree rule quite well. We also learnt from our preliminary task that it’s very easy for our script to change, when we encountered problems due to being unable to use one of the actors in our film we managed to quickly change the script and use a new edited version- much like we did in the preliminary task. I think we did improve a lot from the preliminary task, particularly with editing, as we used the software more we became more accustomed to how it works and managed to make the editing much smoother. Text and music were also used in our main task, these are things we were not familiar with at the start but quickly learnt to use.

I think due to the preliminary task we managed to make our main task much more successful, having used various camera and editing techniques previously with the first task. We were much more confident in creating our film due to this.