Friday 11 May 2012

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

Evaluation Question 7:

Technology
Preliminary Exercise:
To start off, we used my Blackberry Torch 9800(Phone) to record the first few drafts of our preliminary exercise, then when we recieved The Sony Bloggie video camera we shot the whole of our preliminary exercise and used the available Apple Mac's to put together the clips on the applicatin 'Final Cut Pro' and used GarageBand to find a scream like sound to add on top of our recording.

Final Coursework:
We used the Sony Bloggie to record all the drafts and extras of our final coursework, then once again we used the Mac's and Final Cut Pro to put together the shots we recorded but this time we used cuts like Fade In/Fade Out and effects to slow down time which gave emotion and effects which made it look as if the characters were drunk with a blurry drunk effect. We used my phone once again and this time we recorded a theme tune for our film, the phone was to record the first draft of our lyrics which we improved and used a microphone for our final lyrics, using Garageband we found sound effects for certain scenes and sorted out the audio for our theme tune including bass and instrumentals. We have definately improved with technology using everything in much more detail than we had in our preliminary and using much more technology to.

Mise-en-Scene
Preliminary Exercise:
We thought of putting my character in a black suit to give him a more darker look as he is a russian spy and thought it would suit his personality, we didn't do this with any other characters, they just happened to be in suits at the time due to it being in school times. We didn't use any props and thought to use our hands as guns, so we obviouly didn't think much into it. The most obvious thing is the lighting, it is different in every scene and would of need to be sorted out if it were our coursework. Whoopsy.

Final Coursework:
All 3 characters were in suis for our coursework, this was purposful nd we decided to make certain characters look less smart, for instance one doesn't wear a tie and another wears a hoodie to show the rebellion in the teenage characters. We improved with props definately in our coursework as we used glue on Olivers shoulder as bird excrement which i believe would be a prop, we also used a hat and a wine bottle and from this we definately see an improvement from 'hand' guns to wine bottles. The lighting is also a lot more improved in our coursework, we made sure all shots were shot in around about the same lighting and same time of day, then used colour correction on shots that were more dark than the rest, which sorted out the lighting and gives a definite improvement.


Cinematography
Preliminary Exercise:
We were told to put at least 5 different shots in our preliminary and we did this without fail and in my opinion used a varied amount for our preliminary which would be hard to beat in our coursework. The camera was extremely unsteady in our preliminary which we didn't really seem to realise and we broke the 180 degree rule i believe. Unpurposful of course.

Final Coursework:
Our shot types had improved massively, although we already had a varied amount in our preliminary, we were able to use medium shots and long shots in our final coursework due to it being filmed outside, we also showed a lot more expression and friendship with close ups and two shots. Unfortunately our camera skills were still quite shaky in this piece but had definately improved from our preliminary and varied shot types definitely improved as time went on.


Editing
Preliminary Exercise:
We didn't think much into this for our preliminary, we simply put the shots together in order using Final Cut pro and added sound effects such as Stephen's character screaming and a gun shot at the end. Also at the end the screen does freeze but we didn't think much into editing.

Final Coursework:
We put together the shots as we did for our preliminary but we thought that cuts between shots looked to jumpya nd fast paced so we decided to use Fade In/Fade Out to make it look more professional, this is definitely an improvement. We also added a lot more effects such as the slow motion of the scene my increasing gaps between frames and also the drunken 'WideTime' effect, we definately thought more into this and aded a theme tune hich we edited together with audio and sound, then of course added title credits over the tp of this so our skills definitely improved.


Sound
Preliminary Exercise:
We didn't do anything with sound in the preliminary, we simply filmed with our Sony Bloggie and whatever sound we picked up is what we put in our final preliminary.

Final Coursework:
We realised here that the sound was not of high quality and this was probably due to us filming by a busy road, most dialogue was picked up but there was a lot of background noise such as wind and cars, so we decided to overdub the dialogue which was a good idea and helped us understand what the character's were saying but we didn'tnhave eenought ime to finalise the volume.
We also added sound effects such as a bird sound, the sound of someone walking into a door and the theme tune which we made sure was of similar volume to the dialogue and we thought went very well, considering the fact that we didn't even consider sound in our preliminary, we definitely improved.


Narrative
Preliminary Exercise:
Considering this was our preliminary and all we had to do was walk into a roo and share dialogue, i think we established a very clear narrative of an interrogation that got out of hand and ended up in death.  Now this wasn't meant to be of a high standard so i think we did very well anyway.


Final Coursework:
From my feedback, a very clear narrative was established and therefore all the audiences could tell what was going on, compared to our preliminary we did much more preparation on this as we went out of our way to think of a genre, storyline and script, this took time and effort and we put so many hours in for our coursework, in filming, editing, rehearsing and finalising. Overall our final coursework is better than our preliminary in every single way, we used more technology, everything was in more depth, the audience had nothing but positive feedback for our coursework and therefore it was a success.

2 comments:

  1. BLANK POST BLANK POST BLANK POST!

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  2. Have you got your A2 blog set up yet? I need to see those posts pdq please.

    ReplyDelete