Evaluation 7 - Looking at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Looking back at our preliminary task, I feel that I have progressed and learnt a lot since we completed it. I learnt many things during our preliminary task that I took with me and applied during the filming and editing of our final product. For example during our preliminary task I learnt about the importance of having a storyboard, shot list and prop list, without these it can make the filming process longer and more confusing as you don't know what scenes need filming and what order they should be done in. We did not plan out our shots well enough which meant that when we went to edit the film we had some shots missing and it meant that our film didn't flow and the ending was very abrupt. We did not plan our film very well because we were all to excited and just wanted to jump straight into filming it, and because we all had so many ideas in our heads that we wanted to do, so left the storyboard to later when we realised that we needed. We encountered other problems such as, having shaky camera shots and the actors not knowing their lines meaning it did not look very good when we put it together in editing. We also needed to find music, but we didn't understand the importance of choosing music, so we used a piece one of the first pieces of music we found, we didn't look very hard. So looking back at it now I can understand that the music doesn't really fit with the genre of the film and sounds wrong when put together with the film.
From this I have learnt that you need to create your storyboard, shot list and prop list before you start to film along with finding an actor and location to film in.

I learnt a lot from the mistakes I made when making our preliminary film, we were much more prepared when before we started to film our final product. We spent a while forming an idea for our story, then writing our film treatment. We then made our storyboard, shot list, prop list and found our location and actress. I can see the difference it makes by being prepared before going to film as we were far more organised and we knew what to film, what order to film in and we were much calmer when filming because we had everything planned out. This then also meant that our final product improved a lot compared to my preliminary film.
We also did more research into our genre and themes that we wanted to portray, we did this so that we had a better understanding of how to convey certain emotions and themes. We did different types of research, such as watch film openings that were in the genre of psychological thriller then analysing them. This helped us a lot to understand the conventions of a opening to a psychological thriller.
I also now knew the importance of music and how it contributes to the overall film. Because of this as a group we spent many hours trying to find the perfect piece of music and we did a lot of trial and error testing bits of music with the film that we had edited.
Overall I believe that I have learnt a lot since filming our preliminary task and it is shown through the final product for our main task.