Review of Preliminary Exercise

For the preliminary exercise, I wrote the script and the storyboard, and filmed the clips for the video. Together, we all edited the clips into the final outcome of the exercise.

Through filming the preliminary exercise, there were a few important things that I learnt;

• I learnt how important it was for the pace of actions in clips that follow each other to be the same, so that when editing the clips together, you can use match on action to create a flow between them. Also, whilst filming I had trouble moving the camera smoothly at first and ended up with some clips that were jolty. However, as I got used to using the camera equipment, I think I learned how to follow the pace of the action with the camera better. This will be very useful when filming our 2 minute film opening.
• Another thing that I learnt was that sometimes it is best to adjust the script as you film if something is clearly not working out as you expected. The same goes for the shot list, due to a change in filming location, some of the angles and shots had to be changed in order to keep to the 180 rule and make the clips look continuous.
• Finally, I think that the most important thing I learnt from the exercise was how to be able to give and take directions with more confidence and work well in a group. At first I wasn't very confident in expressing my opinion on your progress, but as we went along, we all realised that we needed to give our own input because when we put all of our ideas together to create scenes and solve problems, that was when we produced the best outcome

Our preliminary task turned out quite well, although there were quite a few mistakes that we made that we will know how to avoid in the future. For example, as I mentioned before, in the scene where Lauren (the second character to appear) was walking into the classroom, I dropped the camera down too quickly and you could hear the sound of it and see the clip jog a little. We managed to tone down the sound during editing, but in the future if I was trying to capture the diagetic sound of the scene, I would ensure that there is no outside noise present that isn't meant to be there. I liked the cuts as Rana entered the door, which were not there when we first edited the scene (there was only 1 cut originally), but Lauren suggested making more cuts and it looked a lot better this way.


by Rebecca