Evaluation Post 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you fell you have learnt in the progression from it to the full project?

The preliminary task that we carried out at the beginning of the project helped me to develop my skills in creating a continuity sequence. I learn a lot from this process and this is the sequence my group created:

The Preliminary Task Brief
"Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule."
The Production Task Brief"To produce a 2 minute opening sequence for a fiction film. All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music and audio effects from a copyright-free source. It should be clear from your sequence who he target audience is."

There were some major differences between the two briefs which affected how long we spent on certain aspects of each task:

• you are given much more detail in the preliminary task brief as to what your sequence should contain, which allows you to be a lot less creative than in the film brief which gives you lots of creative freedom. 
•  you are given specific techniques to include in the prelim brief but not in the film brief.
• the film brief focuses on audience whereas the preliminary brief does not

Our initial approach to the prelim task was that we were very focused on producing a technically perfect sequence and were concentrating a lot on our continuity editing and camera skills. We went into the film task, however, focusing a lot more on the creative side to the production and thinking more about our audience and the style of film we wanted to create. We were only able to do this, however, as we had already improved our technical skills in the preliminary task. 

Pre-Production

The pre-production and planning process for each of the two tasks had both similarities and differences. In a way the planning we carried out for the preliminary task was the same as the planning for the real film task but just to a much smaller scale. Please see the table below of all the documents we created during pre production for each tast:

As you can see we planned a lot more during the film task. We created a lot more documents that we didn't for the preliminary task and these documents were much more detailed and useful to us when moving onto production. We learn from planning the preliminary task the importance of detailed and careful planning which can make a production task a lot more easy and successful. We therefore planned our real task with the correct level of precision and detail we needed for it to run smoothly.

Production

The production process for each task was quite different. In the preliminary task we:

• had limited location space as we had to shoot in school
• could only use actors within our group
• had one lesson to complete the shoot

In the film task we:

• could use any appropriate location to shoot off of the school site
• could bring in any actors we required
• had long weekend shoot sessions to shoot our sequence

We used the preliminary task as an opportunity to really perfect our continuity filming skills and therefore this allowed us to focus a lot more on our actors and creating the style of shots we wanted when carrying out our real shoot, as we already had the technical skills from carrying out the preliminary task.

Post Production

There were a few differences in the editing process between the two tasks as I have outlined below:

After the editing of the preliminary task we had learnt all the skills and techniques involved in continuity editing. We were then able to carry these skills over when editing our real sequence which made the task a lot easier.

Conclusion

Overall the preliminary task was a learning curve for me as it taught me things in all aspects of creating a media project:

• pre production
• production
• post production
• working as a team
• evaluating

I believe it was the key to our success as a group in the production of our film task and helped us a lot to produce our end film opening sequence which we are all extremely proud of.