After the Preliminary Task I think that one of the things which I took on board was how much planning has to be made, and then scrutinised. Things which went wrong in the Prelim had to be planned for and avoided in the Final Piece. So in terms of planning, shooting and editing the Prelim was very important. This is what I learnt.
- Getting everything in order beforehand.
Location, actors, equipment and paperwork all need to be booked, alerted or prepared beforehand for a shoot to run smoothly and productively. In the Prelim this was not too bad as the location was just a teachers room, so we had to just ask in advance, whereas the final piece deadline took longer to find. Actors were just group members so this was not too difficult either, unlike the final piece where we had to make sure we had reliable actors, and brief them beforehand so that they knew when we were shooting and where to go. Planning was something which we did not do enough of for the Prelim but we got away with this, however we learnt that in order to successfully shoot our final piece more planning would be needed, we would have to put more thought into the storyboard and plan out our time to our shooting script plus any brakes or processes required.
- Use of Time
One thing about final piece shoots is that you have to plan how you are going to use your time efectively, for example in my group we planned preparation; like fake blood making, set preparation, shooting; each shot in order, not chronologically but logically, and breaks; whens lunch? In the Prelim you can get away with a bit of an unplanned approach due to the nature of only shooting half a minute, whereas for the final piece you need lots and lots of footage as there are so many more variables, like perhaps actors performances between takes amoung other issues like lighting, set, etc. One thing thats important is to not waste time, which sounds obvious but if time starts running out footage gets rushed and thats when you get weak footage, which leads to more reshoots than should be necessary.
-Shoot, shoot and shoot
After shooting the Prelim and getting into the edit suite the biggest issue was our lack of footage. We had only a handful of shots, of which we had way too few takes. Whats more we had minor differences between takes which lead to inconsistencies in lines of actions, which could break up continuity. So for the Final Piece we knew we had to return with an abundance of footage to make editing easier. On top of that we had to maintain things exact between takes.
Differences
The two Briefs did ask for different things, which does mean not everything about the Final Piece can be pre planned for just from doing the Prelim. This is in relation to duration and creativity, where the Prelim wanted a demonstration of complete control and continuity, and the Final Piece required the same plus creativity, music and titles. The major difference for me between the two briefs was the ability reshoot, this allowed us to quite majorly redirect our idea and restoryboard most of it until we were happy. This also meant that we could get shots to a very high standard on a second attempt if we did not execute well on a shoot. Which was sometimes the case.
Improvements
Between the Prelim sequence and the Final sequence I think that our work has improved so much technically. The editing and camera have both been improved alot, as creativity actually played a part in the Final piece. Our general Film making ability has shown improvements, and I think this comes from a process of learning from our mistakes during the Prelim.
Our Final piece implements many of the rules we learnt about for the Prelim like the 180 degree rule, shot - reverse - shot and match on action, but in a more interesting way, and in a more thought out sequence, where there is a narrative more meaningful than a conversation. I think that the Prelim was very important for teaching us how to monitor and work continuity in a sequence. Which we managed to do in our Final Piece.
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