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

During the process of this media project i think that every member of our group has come a long way in terms of experience and knowledge in the field of film making, and this all started when we had a media lesson with Micheal Schillinger in which we were given a tape, a video camera and a scene in which to film creating a story and making the audience really interested in the action, by using different camera techniques. I will talk about how that went below

Our first attempt at filming:
After being given a basic scene to film, we went away and thought about how to use the camera to get different reactions from the audience, and how to communicate clearly what emotions were being felt by the characters. After filming this we got feedback and then were told how to improve it and what we needed to change in order to do this.

Our second attempt at filming:
This time we took on board what Mr.Schillinger had said to us and we tried our best to add that into our little scene, we had a few moments that made the scene look like it was moving to quickly, and we had others when it was moving to slowly, but overall we were told that it had in fact improved from our first attempt because we managed to get right into the action and emotion of the characters.

Our preliminary Task:
For this we had to demonstrate:
-Match on action
-shot reverse shot
- 180 degree rule

Earlier on in my blog i added some videos off YouTube that we watched in the classroom to help us to understand what these techniques were, as it is difficult to verbalize what they all are and how they are achieved. I will put these videos up again to make it easier for you to see what we watched rather than having to look back at previous posts to find them.

Match on action-

This 2 second long video is a good example of what match on action is

Shot reverse shot-

This video shows many different camera techniques but we watched it mainly to see some shot reverse shots between the two characters

180 Degree Rule-

The 180 degree rule was probably the technique that most people in the class found it hard to understand, but this video shows clearly what it is, and after watching it we all felt confident that we knew how to add it into our preliminary task

Continuity is something that all movie makers and directors have to be aware of, and when filming our preliminary task, we had moments where we had to re-do a certain part and as i was acting in it i tried to not move my body dramatically, to avoid my hand being on one part of the table in one shot, and at another point in a next shot after that, that would take away the reality of the action and make the editing stand out, so i concentrated on making sure that didn't happen. 

When doing the editing, Naomi learnt various techniques such as using a green screen to change the background in a scene, we used this in our film when Jenny is looking out of the window in Olivia's house. For the story of our film Olivia's house is right next to a forest which is where she encounters the killer, but obviously my actual house isn't next to a forest so we had to film Attenborough nature reserve first and then edit it into the scene to make it look as if there was a forest outside the house. When i first saw this in our film i thought it looked really good and i was happy with what Naomi had achieved.