7. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
After completing our preliminary task, I feel the whole group learnt about different things from the end of the preliminary task up until filming and editing the final media product. We learnt mainly about things related to time management, lighting, camerawork, music and sound recording, and editing.
We first learnt about how to plan and complete different tasks in certain times. As our preliminary task was not as long as our final opening sequence we were able to complete our filming in one lesson, so we took this attitude with our filming for our opening sequence, on the first day we felt that we would be able to complete a lot of filming in one day, however, this was not the case as we had to put all of the pictures up onto the walls which took a lot longer than we had initially thought and were only able to film a little bit of the opening sequence which wasn’t even included in the opening sequence. From this we were able to understand the importance of time management and then planned what we were going to film before each filming meeting. This was extremely beneficial as we were able to film a lot of our opening sequence during these filming meetings, and without this realisation our filming process would have been very unorganised and chaotic.
In terms of lighting we learnt about how to position the camera in such a way that would allow us to film our footage in the best quality possible. When filming our preliminary task we made the mistake of filming the piece at a direct light source , this made the overall picture bad quality and blurred. After completing the preliminary task we tried out filming the opposite way of a direct light source and hoped that this would produce a better quality. Luckily it did and we were able to film like this and our media product was of an extremely high quality as a result of this. If we had not taken this on board and considered this for our final media product then we would have produced an unclear, bad quality opening sequence. Below is an example of what happened when we filmed at a direct light source and what happened when we did the opposite for our opening sequence.
When talking about camera work we were told for our preliminary task to consider the 180º rule. This is when the director creates large imaginary line down the centre of a scene and one side of this line is dedicated to the cameras and other technologies used to record and film the scene, and the other side is for the acting part of the scene. This rule was made to make sure that the audience do not become confused by any changes in background setting which would be caused if the camera filmed from loads of different angles. This was vital for our preliminary task as this allowed us to understand the basics of how to film our opening sequence. We took this rule and applied it when creating our opening sequence, if we had not done this then the audience would then become confused by the difference in setting. From our preliminary task we also applied the match-on-action rule, this is when editors in post production will put together pieces of footage so that they flow smoothly, for example, if a character was reaching for a door handle in one shot then the next shot would show her opening the door. This rule was made to, again, not confuse the audience and make it look as smooth as possible. This was extremely important for our opening sequence as it allowed us to practise this during post production so that we would understand how to do it for our opening sequence. It also allowed us to understand how much of a scene we needed to film in order for our match-on-action to work as smoothly as possible. If we hadn’t applied these rules then our opening sequence would not have run smoothly and would have looked very unprofessional. From our preliminary task we also changed the camera we used. For our preliminary we used the camera on my iPhone, which did produce a fairly high quality recording but not good enough for our opening sequence. We were given a Samsung OIS Duo to film our opening sequence with which produced a much higher quality picture and sound and was a great improvement from our preliminary task.
As we didn’t use any music or sound recording in our preliminary task there was not much we could go on to develop for our opening sequence. However, the lack of music and sound made the preliminary task sound boring and dull, we took this and decided to include some sounds for our opening sequence. We initially wanted a soundtrack that sounded quite ominous to reflect the topic in the opening sequence but a soundtrack that was also quite fast paced for when panning over the pictures on the wall. After thinking I came up with the “Skinny Love” cover by Birdy. After the girls had listened to it, we all agreed on the soundtrack. We found a instrumental version on Youtube, converted this into an mp3 format and edited it into our opening sequence. Without this music our opening sequence would have sounded extremely dull and boring and would only include the voice over. As there also wasn’t any sound recordings in the preliminary task, other than the dialogue, we decided to include a voice over recording that would read through the letter we created. We first recorded this on iPhone voice memo and then found that this was inappropriate, so recorded the voice over that we used in the opening sequence on Michael’s Mac. Without the use of these technologies we would have produced the high quality voice over that is shown in our opening sequence. Without the voice over idea we wouldn’t have had a clear narrative in our opening sequence and would have had to come up with a different way to make our storyline clear which might have ultimately cost us time.
From our editing process for our preliminary task we were able to take certain aspects of editing and use them when editing our final media product. For example we were able to get used to putting various pieces of footage together in order to try to figure out how to piece our piece together properly using the match-on-action rule. As both of the software’s we used are very similar it didn’t cause a major problem when using a different software for editing our actual opening sequence. As the software for the preliminary task was different to the one we used for editing our media product, we weren’t able to take that much from the editing of the preliminary task to develop for our opening sequence.
Overall, our preliminary task was vital for this course and our progression into creating a media product as without it we wouldn’t of understood anything about real media products and what techniques are used which would have made our opening sequence look unprofessional and unlike any other media product.