Looking Back At The Preliminary - Evaluation

Looking back at the preliminary and comparing the work that we have done since then in the title sequence to the initial practice video we created, it is clear that my skills in both using the camera and the editing software have improved. Furthermore, not only has my ability to ensure that the 180 degree rule is not broken and that the editing maintains continuity and makes sense, but my organisational skills have also greatly improved since starting the initial planning stages. I feel this has happened because of the responsibilities that were put on me as voted by the group to be the organiser of meetings etc. In the final sequence, we felt that a shot-reverse-shot style of cutting would not have been as effective as the shot from the friend's POV that we used. The reason for this is the shot-reverse-shot method would require us to have filmed the argument from behind Ezra's back, but as this was not done easily, given the very small amount of space given behind him in the booth. This meant that the final quality of the shots of Shira on the S-R-S section were not very strong. Additionally, by doing it from 1st person, it allowed us to use the editing software to manually pixilate the picture to give the impression that they were drunk.

Although we planned ahead by creating a story board and having a shooting script, the actual story board was not accurate enough to fit the altered venue, meaning that we had to change the entire argument scene. The reason for this is that, if we had filmed in the abandoned house, the conversation sections would have been vastly different, as there would have had to have been far more people in the background, meaning we would have had to co-ordinate more people, and would have needed a different soundtrack to give the illusion of a party.

By changing these plans slightly when filming, the outcome was far better than we could have hoped. This is because the original idea would probably be too hard to coordinate and it was far more likely for people not to turn up, and that most of the people would have no acting experience.

At the start of the project, after our group had been established, there was a vote to see who would organise the meetings etc, and I was chosen. As a result I decided when and where to meet, ensuring that both I had to be organised and that I was clear in my instructions. This helped develop my organisational, leadership and verbal ability. Using this method, we managed our time so that we each completed certain pieces of paperwork by the deadlines I allocated, which meant that we had time for any missed deadlines too. Unfortunately, there were some points in which the organisation. As well as this, I also had to organise the time we were going to use the venue and then alert the actors and send them reminders.

In the preliminary, there were many mistakes made, such as not leaving enough time before or after we pressed record button on the camera, meaning there was not a lot of time between shots that we could edit out, making editing very hard, and the shots very short. Moreover, the actual quality of the shots were not greatly considered when shooting the preliminary, so only a few takes were filmed for each shot. This compromised the overall quality of the preliminary, but we learnt from this and decided that the same thing would not happen in the real thing, so we took multiple takes of every shot that we filmed in order to make sure we could find the one we wanted when editing. There were a few mistakes made during filming of the actual sequence, such as the takes that went wrong, and the dolly not fitting in where we would have liked, making the filming take far longer than it should have done, as many takes were not unusable due to the movement of the camera. Despite these problems we were able to cope with the issues and they did not have a great effect on the overall quality.