Evaluation Question 7

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

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 match action, shot/reverse/shot and the 180-degree rule.



Main Task Brief
The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes. All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source.

What have I learnt?

During the course of the project, I have learnt many things, but one thing that stood out for me was the fact that careful planning can easily be thwarted by unreliable actors. Both of our initial actors had to be dropped because their prior commitments meant that waiting for them would have been an illogical decision. Jasmine, who was to be our Jessica, was busy with music and Gabriel, who was Angus, seemed to be all over the place, sometimes he was there and other times he cancelled for something else. When we were doing the preliminary task, because our actors were group members, they could be relied upon to be there on time and be reliable for the job. In addition, for the main task, three of the members from our prelim group were already together; me, Narishma and Olivia, which meant that the group already knew how to work together well.


Our initial test shoot

We had a back up plan, however, to use Eoin and Olivia, just in case something like this happened, so we managed to finish our project in time, as we had about 2 weeks to film and edit the whole thing. The reason we had so little time was because of the afore mentioned actors, who caused us to keep pushing back our shoot schedule. Apart from this, I have also learned important skills in After Effects, such as how to key out a green screen, as well as creating titles and applying effects in post production, which will be important for me if I decide to go into film or TV as a career.

What did we do well? What could we have done better?

I think we all managed to keep a cool head in the face of adversity. When we had to deal with our actors, we made our decisions quickly and swiftly. I also think that our pencil scene is rather well done. It looks real enough from a distance, so it really looks like Angus was lifting it with his mind. I know that there are several continuity errors in our sequence, for example, when Angus sits down on the chair after everyone has left, as well as head positions of the extras during the cuts. Another problem is that some of the extras looked at the camera, for example, during the zoom into Jessica’s face, one of the extras kept looking at the camera and fidgeting, making her really noticeable.

The girl in the middle looks noticably awkward

If I were to redo this, I would make sure that all the extras were professional and check and double check our shots on shoot to make sure that we can fix any potential continuity errors, as well as taking a lot more takes.

Editing the sequence

Another thing we could have done better was to create a proper storyboard after we decided on the final final sequence, because the idea changed so much after I’d drawn the initial storyboard that during the shoot, we didn’t even use the storyboard, we used the shot list to check our clips and see if we had all the material we needed to make a complete sequence.

I think we have done really well as a group, we got on with our work and had almost no arguments, avoiding most of them by remaining professional and focussing on the project instead of petty nitpicking. We met on a consistent basis to ensure that all the jobs we needed to get done were split evenly amongst the group. For example, much of our writing up was left for Narishma to do because she is the most organised of our group while all the creative processes, such as storyboards and character sketches were for me to do because I'm the artist in our group.

Original character sketch for Angus

I mentioned that my planning and organisational skills were improved by the prelim and I think it shows because my work is a lot more organised and orderly this time around.