Patrycja Przewlocka - Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Since our preliminary task, I feel that we have improved in a large amount of ways:

Time management: I feel that instead of wasting time planning what to do, like we did in our preliminary task, we made sure that we actually filmed/researched etc. when we were supposed to. This allowed us to do a lot of retakes during the filming of our actual opening because during the preliminary we ran out of time because of our intense planning of the film idea.

Communication: I feel that we communicated a lot better during the filming of our final product. This could be due to the fact that we had more time to film what we needed to and so we weren't under such a high amount of pressure. We also made sure to be more articulate when expressing our ideas which meant that everyone had a lot of input whilst filming the opening to our thriller. Our teamwork improved rapidly as we spent less time bickering and more time shooting the opening which was a problem during the preliminary.

Teamwork: Along with improving our communication, I believe that our group has become more strategic and more efficient in the creation of our final task. During our preliminary, we tended to work individually, and although this allowed us to think of various different ideas, our team found it hard to collaborate because we were all very strong minded. However, when it came to the production of the final product, our team managed to become more willing to compromise, which made the product become strong in all aspects.

Planning: We decided to limit ourselves to a specific amount of time to draw up our storyboards. This is because during our preliminary task, our team spent so much time trying to make the plot the most interesting it could be, we limited ourselves to a very short period of time to film and edit the preliminary task. Timing ourselves helped us vastly in the editing process as we came across a few errors which we didn't we would have and the extra time helped us remove those problems.

Shot composition: I think that we improved majorly when paying attention to the shot composition. In our final piece we made sure to pay attention to every detail.

As you can clearly see here, not only is this shot off-centre, you can also see the tripod and someone behind it in the reflection of the window. You cannot see our actress walking, which made the shot completely useless.

In comparison, the bathroom shot from our final piece is not off-centre and does not shot the camera in the mirrors - which is a common mistake made even by professionals. This shows that we clearly took the advice given to us as we made sure to pay attention to all of the details.This was extremely important to us because the independent audience was more likely to notice such errors as they would have concentrated symbolism and picked up on any out-of-place mise-en-scene.





Editing: Seeing as we had more time to edit, we made sure that we had no jump cuts in our final product, such as this one from our preliminary task:

Overall, I think that editing is something that we did well in both in the preliminary task as well as the final opening - the lack of suitable footage meant that the jump cut existed. Seeing as I was in charge of editing in my group I made the editing as precise as I could, which I think reflected on the hard work we did as a group. I think that I improved so much on the editing on iMovie that I felt confident enough to edit an extremely short clip successfully.