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?

Since the preliminary task I have learnt many skills on how to improve on the key areas when it comes to creating an original opening to a film.

One of the areas that I have seen improvement in is my use of camera work when comparing my preliminary task to the final film opening. We used a range of different shots from medium shots to long shots. Throughout recording the footage for the preliminary I wasn't aware of how unstable the shots were, as seen throughout the task it is clear that the pan shots were unstable. This showed that I needed to be more careful when it came to using any shots that included moving the camera whether it be a pan, tracking and even static shot. This is reflected in my final product as at 1:22 the pan shot is shown to be much more stable and smooth and is effective in leaving what the antagonist is doing to the victim to the audience’s imagination. Another aspect I have improved on is making sure that the lighting doesn't directly affect how the shot turned out on camera. At 0:18 the following shot is shown to be affected by the light coming from the window as it removes a large amount of detail on the characters face which was not planned during preliminary, this was something that I had not considered about when it came to doing footage. This was reflected back on my final product as when we were filming the shots that are outside the sunlight made it feel too welcoming and didn’t fit the themes that I was planning for so I included a black tint and lowered the brightness to solve the problem of the sunlight, furthermore, I changed the colour palette to make it seem more cold than warm.

The editing in my final film opening has also improved massively throughout the course, I was using CS5 Premier Pro for editing my final product. Although I also used it for editing my preliminary the amount of features I knew about the software in general was limited to the basics such as cutting and moving shots around. A feature I learned to utilise during the year was effects that change the colouring of the shots to help set the tone and develop the desired themes for the opening. As seen in my preliminary task, it has some similar themes when compared to my final film opening, however, the use of changing colour really helped to show the tone and themes to the audience much more effectively. When editing the shots together my preliminary shows that I had some idea of how to make the look smooth but there were still a few shots that made it feel a bit jumpy in the preliminary, however, in my final product there were a few shots that still had this problem but I solved this by putting shots of other things happening in the opening to keep the opening feeling smooth editing wise. The match action shot that I included in my final product has improved since the preliminary as learning more about the editing software helped to make the shot look more smooth and fits the movement the characters with the changing of shot position and angle.

Another feature I learned was how to adjust the volume for shots and how to change volume for specific parts of the shot. For example, in my final edit wherever there was dialogue in the opening I adjusted the audio so that it could be heard over the music being played throughout. In my preliminary I left the sound in and this was an issue as the sound of classrooms could be heard in the background, ruining the feeling of the footage portraying the characters of being the only ones there, furthermore, I did not include the use of music in preliminary, this failed to help bring the desired effect when mixed with the background noise. This improved in my final edit as I have included background music and have adjusted diegetic noises to be audible but have changed it so that the non-diegetic sounds are much more prominent.

I was limited to having the setting of my preliminary being on school grounds due to time restrictions. Although, even if this did affect the mood I was planning to have overall, the costume worked quite well with the setting considering the two main characters were wearing smart attire and the recording location was school grounds. However, when it came to my final edit the amount of time we had available to complete the footage and edit helped me to create a much more in depth opening.