Preliminary Task

Lesson 1, Preliminary Task 1

For my first lesson I joined Danielle McCart, Samantha Preistaman and Samantha Bevans group. Our first task as a group was to finish the story boards they have previously started. As part of the group work we discussed ideas and I came up with alternative ideas for the story board. For example I felt a diegetic sound of a scream would work better that using a sound affect.
Next lesson we will be finishing our storyboard by adding more detail and the edit we are going to use.

Lesson 2, Pleminary Task 1

We started the lesson by finishing our story board, we added timings and discussed what shots would work best for each scene.
In the second part of the lesson we decided to start the filming. Our friends Katie and Sam helped us by playing the characters in the short film. Samantha Bevan was the main cameraman, Danielle McCart was the director, me and Samantha Preistman had the responsibility of making sure the camera angles were correct and followed the instructions we put on the story board.
Unfortunately we ran out of time so next lesson we will see what scenes we have and start to edit them.

Storyboards

Lesson 4, Preliminary Task 1

During this lesson me and my group finished editing the video using the apple macs. We all worked together and each had a go editing some of the clips we filmed. Once the editing process was finished we posted our short film on YouTube

Preliminary Report           

The main idea for mine and my group’s prelim report was based on the genre of sci-fi/thriller we chose to do this as it was a different genre we had not yet explored and we knew later on in the course we would be exploring thrillers. We also felt that this genre would enable us to be creative with what we shot. The idea behind the preliminary task was a scientist coming up with a new potion that had to be tested and for the experiment to not go as planned.

In our prelim I was really pleased with how the editing went, particularly the transaction between scenes. The match-on-action featured in our film was really effective as during the editing process we made sure the two separate shots flowed without any obvious break. Though the overall editing process was a success there were some down sides, for example many members of the group including me had never worked with the macs. Editing on the macs taught us that it was important to not use many transitions and over edit the clips as it would take away from the overall realism. It also taught us to try and focus on the diegetic sound featured in shots, as we found that background noise often interfered with the dialogue in the shot, next time to work around this issue we should leave time to add non diegetic sound and possibly do voice overs.  



Another thing that went well in our preliminary task was the range of shots we featured, for example we used over the shoulder, long shot, mid shot and reverse shot. Using a number of shots interests the audience more as they are not restricted to one shot which can often be very boring. During the opening sequence we used an over the shoulder shot as we felt it would establish the characters environment to the audience.

From the preliminary task I have learnt that timing is very important. During the editing process we found much of the dialogue we had filmed was not picked up by the camera and at this point we could not re film the same sense as the costumes would have been an issue. To work around the problem we added two completely new scenes with new actors. We did this as we believed dialogue was an important feature and without it the storyline would not make sense.