Post 10: Evaluation

Luckily I’ve already done GCSE media and was therefore at an advantage when it came to knowing about; shot sizes, location recces and script writing however doing the preliminary has allowed me to develop my skills in a range of areas especially working with a team which was very useful as I learnt how we could incorporate numerous good ideas and turn it into a strong great idea. Whilst we were doing the pre-production we as a team had to learn to communicate and find out everyone’s strengths and weaknesses which were great as we could help each other out if need be. Thankfully we never found working together a challenge as we always discussed everyone’s ideas and let them have a say, which was great when it came to getting creative trying to find out a unique and original idea that none of the other groups would think of. During the task I have learnt that there are many risks whilst filming and watching for continuity, by doing a risk assessment at the place of filming we managed to evaluate everything that could go wrong  so when it actually came to filming there was no risk of someone or equipment getting damaged.  Although I know from previous experience how to handle the equipment I’m positive I’ve learnt more by completing this preliminary task.  

Other skills I learnt came from overlooking important details such as during filming we realised the library was unavailable so we had to reschedule and do it after school instead, some of the shots were not perfect due to our acting so we had to redo a fair few. The skills I learnt from having these obstacles in the way were how to be more independent as before in GCSE we were kept in a more controlled environment, but now when our group faced the obstacles we sorted them out ourselves only informing the teacher of what our changed plans were. 

When we had finished filming and were happy with the footage we had we then moved on to the post production using the editing suite and although we had followed instructions carefully when both filming and editing and having previous knowledge of the process of using the editing suit we did have some problems to overcome such as our camera would not correspond with the editing suite and refused to capture, yet we simply changed the camera and this meant we had overcome yet another problem. I was aware of some of the skills needed for the editing suite though thanks to completeing this task I am more confident in my skills as I've learnt how to crop footage and edit it together, how to label each rush and how it's important to take note of the in and out code. Not only did I gain more confidence in my skills when it came to editing the footage but I also gained confident in my editing skills as I learnt how to add credits at the opening and closing of the film and how to add fading effects.

Looking back over the finished product of our preliminary task I realised that we had not stuck to our script completely as we unfortunitly ran out of time so this could prehaps be a target for me to work on, another target could be to vary camera shots as there were groups of certain shots together which meant the tention could have suffered as the camera shots didn't help build tention but kept it average.