Preliminary Task Evaluation

Preliminary Task Evaluation

Our pre-production process was well planned. We employed good actors and briefed them in their character roles, we drafted a storyboard, and we came up with ideas of what shots to use, where to position them, what angle they would be at and if there would be any camera movement, and we decided on a location. Our location - E3 - was available at the time we were filming and so we filmed there as planned. This location enhanced the 'high-school romance' theme well, as it is a secondary school classroom. In addition, we informed Jak and Natalie (our actors) what they should wear and what props they should have, e.g. their school bag and a pencil case; as accurate mise-en-scene reinforces the illusion of a film.

The production section of our preliminary task was really good - our actors were punctual and we filmed each shot at least twice, and with buffers so as to gain enough from each shot without cutting any of them too short. Moreover, we had a props assistant (Brittany) who helped us with our hair-dryer shot (where Jak imagines Natalie smiling at him and her hair is blowing in an imaginary breeze) - this was helpful because it meant that I could concentrate on being the camera woman and Yasmin could focus on being the Director and so deciding the angle, position and length of the shot. As we filmed our scenes we kept a very good rule of thirds, and performed our frame-work well. We also kept to the 180 degree rule when filming the short piece of dialogue between Jak and Natalie.

However, when we were filming we wanted to do the part where Jak dreams about Natalie in slow motion, and have music playing, instead of the hair-dryer blowing, to enforce the idea of Jak's dramatic and comic feelings of love towards Natalie. We did film this shot in slow motion with a go-pro that was leant to us by one of our actors (Jak), however there were issues when uploading the shots and so instead we tried to make our normal shots from the school camera slow motion through editing but we did not have enough time to do so. As a result of this, next time we film we will allocate more time to our post-production to ensure that we have enough time for everything.

Yasmin and I filmed our preliminary task at school, in the English block, this meant that any ambient sound from other classes and students was kept in the film as all of the sound we had was all recorded at the time of the shots. This means that we did not present many skills in the way of sound production as we feel that we did not have enough time to do so properly. In our post-production process we focused on: stringing the shots together by using continuity editing; scene transitions, such as dissolves, overlaps and straight cuts; and, we focused on incorporating our title into the beginning of the sequence. To make our main task better than our preliminary task, we will improve on our sound producing skills - by adding in some sound in the post-production process, for example adding in a score.

This is the link to our Preliminary Task: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefgCDX0mdI.