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

At the start of the school year, we were assigned a group (four or so people) in whichwe had to create a short cfilm of somebody walking through the corridor and entering a room. During this task, I learned how to use different shots effectively and it influenced a lot of the shots we chose to use for our film opening (eventhough I was in a different group). You can also see a improvement in the professionalism of our shots from the preliminary task to our final.

Film from our preliminary task                             'Big City' Opening scene

In my preliminary task, the continuity was not smooth, the camera cuts when the character is around a meter away. This looked very unprofessional and did not show any editing skills. In 'Big City' I made sure that I showed smooth continuity so as I (Agata, the protagonist) walk towards the illuminated advertising hoardings, I walk in front of the camera and when it cuts away to a medium shot, the transition is very neat. In comparison, the movie opening looks a lot more professional. 

On the left side of the picture above, you can see that Olivia's face is barely visible because of the light coming from the window behind her. It makes the scene look a lot more darker compared to when the camera cuts to my face being well-lit. In contrast, the picture of the right is a screen grab on the right is from 'Big City'. We placed the camera in a place which would give us a good light source rather then facing the window. The scene looks a lot more professional and you can see a clear improvement from the preliminary task.

When Olivia is checking her phone to see who is calling, we used a Point of View shot, it clearly showed the Caller ID but the lighting is very dark compared to the other shots. Whereas in our film opening we used an Over the Shoulder shot which proved to be more effective as you could show a lot more visually and it stayed connected the character as you could see them. The lighting is also a lot more brighter and fits in with the other scenes.

Furthermore, the music in our preliminary task often switches. There is a lot of background noise and the dialogue is very difficult to understand because of this. This was one of the reasons that we chose to have  non-diegetic music over our scene rather then dialogue. In the shots that we took in Piccadilly Circus, there were Police sirens and shouting, we thought that it made the shots sound unpleasant so deleted the sound.

During the post-production of the preliminary task, I did the editing and it was my first time using Final Cut Pro Express. I learnt how to crop scenes and create smooth transitions, it prepared me for the editing that I was going to do for the film opening.

URL to the full video of our preliminary task: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2lrLmanC40