Evaluation question 7

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

When looking back on our preliminary task we believe that our camera work and editing techniques have improved throughout the whole course. For our preliminary task, we were asked to produce and edit a short film that included match on action,  the 180 degree rule and a shot reverse shot. We successfully completed this task however there were some faults in our clip including slightly wonky framing work and lighting. 

As you can see from the image on the right of our preliminary task, the frame is wonky, this is due to us not checking whether the camera was directly straight when attached to the tripod. We learnt from this and in our opening sequence, continuously checked if the framing was straight. Below is an example of this, it is a wide shot of on of our characters on a swing here we made sure that our framing was completely straight.

This is a wide shot, which appears in our opening sequence. It doesn't quite show the characters features clearly creating a mysterious feel, to help form a sense of fear towards the audience. The lighting is dark, with a single light shining on the character, this helps to contrast with the dark environment and emphasise her ghostly appearance.

Our preliminary task was the first clip we filmed and produced. The clips we filmed had different lighting in each scene. This made the clip look un-effective, as we learnt that lighting is a key feature and needs to be kept consistent throughout. The picture to the left shows a frame from our task, the lighting is very bright and presents a clear image of the person. This is because the camera was facing the same way as the source of light.

As shown in this image to the right, in the next cut in out preliminary task the camera was positioned in an opposite direction to the source of light, making the scene darker and creating an unclear image. The contrast between these lightings made the short clip appear very un-proffesional and made our shot reverse shot slightly un-effective. We therefore became aware of this problem in our real opening sequence.

 This was an important aspect to remember when filming our opening sequence and we therefore tried to keep our lighting consistent and maintained the similar lighting throughout. In our opening sequence we used quite dim lighting throughout to show it is shot at night time as he wakes up and to continue with our scary horror atmosphere. To show facial features we used spot lights.

 Overall, we believe that we have learnt alot about camera work and editing in progression from our preliminary task to our full product. We have used various different camera shots, e.g match on action, panning, close-ups. We also became more advanced in terms of editing, such as graphical transitions and stylising clips to suit our horror genre.