Huda Hashi- Question7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

MIS-EN-SCENE

In our preliminary we made many mistakes, for example our film was set in the 50's and our film was also set in an office, however, we didn't manage to cover all the objects around that made it obvious that it was set in a school. At the time of filming we did not realise these errors but we knew that the task was mainly focusing on our camera skills. In our final product we knew the mistakes we made in the preliminary therefore made sure that we prevented it from happening again. In our final piece we didnt focus as much on continuity as the preliminary task, it was more of a montage and just tried to get the audience to get a sense of  what genre we're trying to convey. Once we got on to our final product we were aware that the location would be a very important aspect, this was after seeing our preliminary finished. When we spotted out the setting errors we started looking for our perfect location for our opening squence. This took us a while as we had different options but we had to be sure our choice would suit our story well.  These pictures to the right show the difference of our preliminary task and final product. The areas highlighted help to illustrate the errors I have mentioned above. The final product print screen demonstrates how we overcame this problem and this was simply but using close up shots instead of mid-shots as used in the preliminary task.

CAMERA

I feel like my camera skills improved drastically once we had got to our final task, with help from the preliminary task and practice shots we carried out ourselves as we wanted to be sure that we knew how to use a camera to the best of our ability. In the preliminary task we hand-held the camera. When we were filming our final product we used a tripod and tracks. This was to prevent the camera from shaking, we wanted to make sure we had steady shots. When we did our preliminary we had very little experience with the camera but was very pleased with the outcome of the product, I believed it to be quite impressive for a first mini-task. These print screens show the difference on how well we got the camera to focus by using a tripod. In the preliminary task print-screen the camera does not focus well on the pile of money which I believed caused a bit of distraction to the viewer, by picking up these difficulties it was essential to overcome them in the future. Also in the preliminary task we used the Canon camera which is larger than the Sony Camcorder, we discovered that as we are all rather small it would be much more suitable for us to use the smaller camcorder to prevent from shaking as the larger camera happened to be heavy. This helped us improve drastically from our preliminary task as we did not face these problems during our final product. 

EDITING

I found editing a very interesting part of the process, we used iMovie. I found it straight forward to use as I had used it previously. We had a conversation in our preliminary task, this was somehow difficult as we had to make sure we had every line in. Editing made our product more intrguing to the viewers as we added effects on the colour and the voice of the actress. Once we got on to our final task we were more fimiliar with the Apple computers and iMovie. Our skills developed drastically in our final product. We discovers effects we had not been aware of previously, this was the over lapping effect. I believe that this effect had a major impact on the audiences interest towards the opening squence.

PLANNING

Planning was a major point in producing our products as we worked as a team we had to keep in contact in order to meet up to work on our project. Both our final and preliminary needed a lot of planning as we had to collect our props and we all had to make sure we had the right props. Planning did not only include meeting up with each-other but also the storyboard, we took pride in planning our narrative for our preliminary task and our final product. However we spent a longer period working on our storyboard for our final task. 

This (on the right) is our storyboard for our preliminary task, as you can see we did create a storyboard, however, compared to our final task storyboard this is quite brief. We discovered that a detailed storyboard will help up in producing an outstanding product.

This (on the left) is our final task storyboard, this is much more detailed than our preliminary task this helped us put our final piece together.