Evaluation 7

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

In the progression from my pre-lim to the full product I feel I have learnt many things and this is reflected in the obvious improvement.

Just by looking at the pre-lim it shows how basic both our camera skills and editing skils were at the begining of this process and by comparing it to the final product we can see how much we have learnt about the research,shooting and evaluating.

When conducting the research it was clear that this would affect our product, I learnt a lot about the genre and the conventions used when making a film. We spent a lot of time researching real media texts from our chosen genre as well as looking at female main characters. The research was one of the most important aspects when looking at the progression from pre-lim to now. When we did our pre-lim due to time constraints we didnt have any time to plan. This meant that we had no storyboard or call sheet or treatment and we had very limited time to get shot variation due to bad time management. If we compare this to our final product we had more than one storyborad as the idea kept changing in the early stages and having changes made becuase of our audience feedback it meant our product would develop more at each stage. We could make sure the product was close to its best because we had the time.

If we look at the technical side of making the product we can see that with the pre-lim the editing was very basic, we had no soundtrack and hardly any transitions we didnt have time to create reshooting because of things such as not having the camera in the right place of having a unsteady shot. In comparison to the final product it is clear that we had developed a lot in regards to editing (using diffent transitions and titles from iMovie) and the use of sound (using garageband to create our soundtrack). Sound was one thing that we didnt particularly like in the pre-lim, it wasnt very good quality, we learnt how to use the boom mic which improved the quailty of the sound in the product.

The editing of the product was done to a much higher standard, this was partly due to being able to re-shoot after we have seen what does or doesn't work and we had to understand when to use fast-pace editing to create the desired effect, this we did not know when making the pre-lim. We also used a tripod to overcome the issue of a unsteady shot. Shot variation was another thing which we improved on a lot, in the pre-lim we had very limited shot variation with it mostly being shot-reverse-shot, in the product we had cut-away shots, close ups and establishing shots, more two-shots could of been done even thoguht shot-reverse-shot is good as it helps with exposition.

Audience feedback was a really good way of us testing our idea on people and being able to change it to make it better, by doing these improvement it shows how are product has progressed from our inital idea when we had to pitch the idea to the class and pick what we wanted to do (which we didnt do with the pre-lim) to the final product complete with idents.

Im many of the shots in our pre-lim the lighting is not very good which means seeing the characters is rather difficult, where as in the product we were able to make the insideof the salon very well light and in the treatment room we wanted a dark place to make it have a false sense of relaxation. The casting fo the pre-lim was done only by using the people in the group as due to bad time mamngement we didn't have time to do any casting, in the product we were able to get people who reasonably resembled the ideal characters. We also made it clear the costumes we wanted our characters to wear whereas in the pre-lim we just wore what we had on that day so it didnt look very realistic. The mise-en-scene of the pre-lim was not in our control we used a class-room that was free at the time, in the product we wanted to make sure we had the salon looking like it was new and clean, we also wanted to make sure things like the pad and the scissors were clearly in the shots. Another problem with the pre-lim was the continuity, Sophie walked through a door into one room but came through the door into another, this made the pre-lim look very amateur. The idents are another way of showing how our editing and computer skills have progressed as they are very good. Achieving verisimilitude was difficult in the pre-lim but it was also hard to achieve in the product especially when we had to re-shoot but we made it work.

Making sure that the individual roles were shown was hard as in the pre-lim we just worked together and didnt show who did what. Also making sure that we worked in a group with everyones views being discussed was hard as sometimes people had different ideas. One of the problems with the final product was getting everyone to commit with a day to shot as wel as getting the cast to be there aswel. It was also added pressure to make things to a good standard because we had other peoples grades as wel as our own to think about.