Evaluation Activity 7

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

The opening to a thriller movie project has enabled me to gain a wider knowledge of how to structure a film using micro-elements such as mise-en-scene, sound, editing and cinematography, and given me a deeper understanding into the process of film making, including all stages of production consisting of pre-production, production and post-production.

Pre-production process is the process before filming; in which planning takes place. Through creating our final piece, I have learnt that this process is a longest and most important process in successfully making a film. Whilst carrying out the preliminary task, we only created a treatment, a storyboard and a script. However, when planning our final piece, we had to produce more pre-production material. This involves a wide range of time consuming processes such as creating a treatment, storyboard, script, shooting schedule, production schedule, etc. which are all essential for the production progress to prevent any problems.

The production process is the process of filming the project. This is where equipment such as the Flip camera and props are needed, and also the locations. I personally think that the shots used for our preliminary task were very basic and below our level. However, for our final product we managed to create a film which fully showed our skills in filming, by using shots we were capable of shooting, and then pushed this further into the use of more complicated shots.

The post-production process includes the editing process, which involves uploading the recording onto the Mac, and using editing software, such as iMovies HD. For our preliminary task, we didn’t do much editing as all we did is cut shots, and add a transition at the end. However, for our main piece, we used editing to cut shots as well as merge them, and add transitions and credits. We also added black and white effect, along with music, which is something we didn’t add to our prelim task.

 Overall, 3 main features were required to be implicated into the 30 second clip of the preliminary task: 180 degree rule, shot-reverse-shot and match on action. These expectation were fulfilled in our preliminary task, and were also used effectively in our final piece, we used all three techniques and branched off into more advanced ones. We applied them productively into the film without having to use dialogue to imply certain things to the viewer.