7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full products?

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full products?

We learnt a lot from our preliminary task, which was very useful when it came to our final piece.

• Time keeping was one of the most important things that we learnt from our continuity task as we planned to have another scene in our opening. After writing up the story board and plans for our main task, we reflected on our preliminary task and realised that  we couldn't fit it into the 2 minute limit of our opening and agreed to not bother filming this. This proved to be the right choice as without that final scene, the piece came to just over two minutes. 

• Another aspect of the task we learnt a lot from was editing, as no one in our group had ever worked with the software before, such as iMovie and garageband, and so we had to work from a process of trial and error. This worked well, it was just very slow at the beginning of editing for our continuity task. But we were very grateful to gain the experience so that editing for our final piece was quicker, even though there was more footage to edit. 

• Sound is the aspect we learnt most from, as we had to keep the dialogue in a chronological order but shot from different angles. We found this difficult as, to keep the shots that we wanted, we discovered that the slamming of the door came in the wrong time, meaning that it repeated itself. To fix this, we muted the sound on the first clip and kept in the slam of the door in the second clip. This worked well as we make some music to go over the top of the first shots to build up the tension, with the door slamming being the climax. From this we learnt how to overcome sound difficulties and applied this to our final product as we had trouble with the sound of the wind droning out the dialogue. As the dialogue wasn't important to the plot, we did the same thing as our preliminary task and muted the dialogue and used a voice over instead, which proved very effective and we were very happy with the outcome.
• Camera work was new to all of us when we started our continuity task, so we learnt about the 180 degree rule, match on action and shot reverse shot and had to put them into practice. This took a while as we were keen to keep everything as accurate as possible. However, after some practice, we got the hang of it. 

Camera movements and Shots

These first three shots show shot reverse shot from a distance. This is used to keep continuous action but to show it from different angles. We learnt that we had some freedom with this shot, which is why we did it from different sides of the door, to show both the characters. We also wanted to show the slamming of the door as dramatically as possible. From this, we learnt that we could use shot reverse shot a lot in our final piece as we had lots of freedom and choice with how to use it. In the end, we used shot reverse shot mainly for the car scene, to show Mitch getting in and out of the car. This worked well as it helped the action flow better, but meant we could include different and interesting shots to include Pierce in as well.

Throughout the whole piece we had to abide by the 180 degree rule. This was difficult as we wanted to film the door so we had to set up facing the door at  certain angle so that we could also include a window so that we could film the hat falling out of the window. We learnt a lot from this as we realised that we could have the line anywhere that we wanted, so when we were filming on location, it was easy to use the half of the car park behind us as our line. It was the same in the shed as we were only using one half of it and were keeping all of our equipment and props such as make up on the other half, so obviously we couldn't film that.

This is when we included match on action. This is when we show a close up of the action being filmed from a medium shot. Here, we go front his shot to a close up of Mitch's face. Yet all the while the dialogue continues as normal. This was a struggle as the piece was improvised so cutting the dialogue in the right place was hard and took lots of practice which we were grateful to have when editing out final piece. However, we didn't use any direct match on action in our film opening, we focussed more on having a mix of close ups, medium shots and different angled shots. We did use match on action during the car scene, when we filmed the car pulling up next to Pierce, a close up of Pierce's reaction, and then back to the pulled up car again. This was brilliant and I thought it worked really well to help the audience start to understand and see into the characters personalities and thoughts in a subtle but effective way.

These shots (right and above) remind me of one another, as does the very last shot with the car driving off. From our continuity, we learnt how to effectively follow a moving object with the camera for effect. When we came to editing, we could either slow this down or speed it up depending on what we decided looked best. For our continuity we changed the hat falling into slow motion to emphasise the falling and create a dreamier state. We considering doing this to our final piece as well but decided that, to keep the realism, we would leave it how it was.

These shots remind me of one another as the shot from the continuity task shows the hat falling from a distance, and the car shot is the same, except it's close up of the car wheel which later goes into seeing the car drive off at a certain distance as well. We learnt that this looked good through the continuity task which is why we used it in our real piece.

Editing 

Here, you can see the titles we included in our continuity task. Personally, I don't think this looks very professional and we were sure we wouldn't use something like this in our real piece as it was boring, simple and not very adventurous. As well, we wanted our titles for the real thing to reflect our genre of film.




However, learning about how to insert titles in our continuity task was real useful and we found it interesting playing around with them. It was also useful as, even though I don't like these titles, we knew that this isn't what we wanted for our final piece. When it came to looking at other film openings, we realised that we needed to include the actors and camera women's names, so to make our final piece look more professional, this is what we did. We learnt how to put the titles over the top of filmed footage by playing around with the software in our continuity task, so it was great to get straight to editing and we knew exactly what we had to do.

 From editing, we also learnt how to create special effects, such as reversing the footage like we edit here, to make the effect look like it was going back in time. We learnt this from the shot of the hat falling out of the window which can be seen above.