Evaluation Question 7...

Looking back at preliminary task (continuity task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the final product? 

I have learnt how to know what makes successful/good footage or not. I leant that although if it is wrong the first time, keep going and make it right, not to stop and give up because it didn't go the way i had planned. I learnt how to successfully use final cut pro to construct a final product, I also leant how to use the effects and functions correctly to add effects to fit in with the genre of film.

These are two screen shots from my preliminary task and my final product. Here I have shown that in both I have used a tripod to get a steady shot. In my final product, however, I moved the camera around whilst still on the tripod, this is different than my previous task because I did not use that function. My first task looked more plain as you had to watch her walk a long way from the same angle whereas with my final film, it was less boring as you followed him walking instead.

These two are of my preliminary task, I chose to show these as what I have learnt because there is an error in the continuity. As the first shot shows, there are no people in the room, you can't see anyone through the door windows and the next show shows there to be 3 people in the place where you should be able to see them. This was because when we filmed this, we didn't know what could be seen or what should be seen. Had my final product have more people in it, we would've made sure they could be seen if they needed to be, this makes it easier to follow and get the flow of the clip.

This shows the first task with very poor lighting, we didn't use and lights and the blinds were down letting in very little natural light. The second image shows we made good use of the natural light available in our location of the woods. Again, had we needed to film in the dark or inside, we would make sure we had suitable lighting and use as much natural light as we could,

These images show 'cross cutting'. The first task cross cuts from person to person during a conversation, whereas in my film we used cross cutting only once as the rest of the footage was faded in between titles. I think the preliminary task cross cutting worked well as there were no jumps in between the conversation and the angles matched up well at eye level.

In my final film, we used a lot of fade effects to interchange between each shot and the titles so it didn't all appear out of no where. My preliminary task used no fades and were all cross cutting scenes, however, I know that the fade tool would not be suitable for the continuity task because they were all very similar shots and fading would not have made it flow as well.

And lastly, these screenshots show two different ways of filming. The first being an over-the-shoulder shot, showing the shoulder of the person in the foreground and people in the background. This is mostly used in conversation scenes as it clearly shows who someone is talking to. The second image is a point-of-view shot, this shows what it is like looking trough someone's eyes, in this case the killers eyes looking at the boy in the back ground.

In conclusion to this question, my skills on how to determine what makes a good shot has improved, a long with how something should be filmed and where or where not to use special effects, i.e, fade. I have also learnt to check the lighting of the footage and make sure to put what needs to be seen in the background so it doesn't affect the continuity flow.