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?

The preliminary task took place just before the Christmas holidays, in which we split up into groups and made a basic film in which we had to display a number of video editing and filming skills, such as match on action. We were not in the same group for this, Joe was with Olivia and Bianca, and Jake was with Becky and Kimmy.

Joe

When I was working with Olivia and Bianca, we encountered a number of problems, such as when we thought we were filming and we weren’t, meaning we had lost a small amount of footage, but it was something we could easily recover from with other shots we had. Another issue we had was having strange shots that didn’t go together very well. From all this I learnt a number of things such as being careful when filming and making sure shots went together well in editing.

 Jake

The short film that Kimmy, Becky and I created was quite good. We received good feedback from the teachers and other students, so I was confident going into the coursework.

After the preliminary task, and the Christmas holidays, we were then all allowed to choose new groups, in which we teamed up and made our group, HYDC. Once we were all grouped up, we had 2 weeks to prepare for our filming.

Once everything was planned, we could finally start filming, which we were very prepared for, we had storyboards and screenplays all done, which were prepared to change slightly if we thought of funnier or better things on the day, which we did. When we were filming we made sure that all our shots would flow together nicely and there would not be any odd cuts, something Jake was already a bit more educated on from his preliminary task, resulting in what we felt were shots that, when edited, all went together nicely.

When it came to the framing of the shots, Joe was a little sloppy about these, and occasionally forgot to pay close attention to them, but Jake was very attentive to the shots, in which Joe eventually caught on and started making sure all the shots were framed well. I(Joe) think this came to the preliminary task again, in which we worked in small conditions, so there weren’t many options for shots and we were happy with the ones we got.

Editing was something that was very tricky for what we had envisioned, one example of this was having words coming from behind a character as he walked, but when it came to editing, we found that not only would it be unnecessary, it would be time consuming, and we could be putting that time into making the film generally better and more refined. In the preliminary task, the editing was fairly simple and consisted of editing cuts together and putting in some credits, so since then there have been numerous improvements in our skill set.

The biggest improvement we believe was iMovie, at first we were completely clueless when it came to it, simple tasks took lengthy amounts of time, but as we went on there was clearly progression in our ability to use it, as we were using keyboard shortcuts more efficiently and although the program doesn’t include many advanced tools, we became more able at the simpler tools.

One of the biggest problem we had initially, and we found a lot of people struggled with this, was using a mac in general, most people in the class were new to macs, including us, but they are fairly intuitive and we caught on how to use them fairly fast, we also think that as we grasped how to use a mac, other programs were easier to use on it.

Overall, there have been a lot of improvements, that will make doing media A2 easier as we won’t have to start from knowing nothing about filming, editing and using macs to having a decent understanding of them.