Preliminary Exercise Questions

What Have You Learnt From From Completing This Task? Looking Ahead, How Will This Learning Be Significant When Completing The Rest Of Your Foundation Coursework, Do You Think?

This preliminary exercise helped us practice using our skills and allowed us to make mistakes this time round so that we can avoid these errors when it comes to the real thing. It has helped us learn a lot of things that we never thought were relevant before when shooting, planning and editing. 

When we were shooting our sequences i learned that you had to shoot it in the most convenient and efficient way, not the way that your shots are going to appear in your final sequence. Before we carried out this task i never knew this is how a sequence was shot, instead i thought it was shot in the order it appeared on a story board, so making a shooting script and shooting in a different order was all new to me. However this has helped me to learn for the final project and i will hopefully be more confident about doing it. 

Thinking about the continuity of our sequence was also all new to me when carrying out this task. When making past video sequences the shots were random and did not have to be in a certain order or make sense to the audience. When carrying out this task i found out just how hard it was to keep the continuity of the sequence correct and we had to shoot each shot a large number of times because when watching them back we found lots of errors with the continuity such as poor matches on action and bad eye line matches. Doing this task has helped me notice things like this more so that when it comes to our real coursework project i will be able to spot these mistakes and correct them more quickly rather than it being extremely time consuming like it was in this exercise because we had never taken these things into account before. 

When it came to editing our sequence, a lot of the dialogue was hard to put into the shot reverse shot sequence because the pauses between one actress speaking and the other one answering her was too short, therefore we had to be very careful when it came to cutting the clips otherwise we could of lost half the dialogue and therefore ruin the continuity. This was a very time consuming process and when working to such a tight schedule was very difficult to do so we ended up rushing it. When it comes to making our real film opening i have learned that in order to make this process easier we should leave longer pauses between one persons line and another persons line so that when cutting the clip it can be done more easily and will therefore look more natural and flow better, making the continuity of the sequence more professional. 

A lot of our shots could not be used due to various problems with the continuity, sound or framing that we only noticed when it came to editing our sequence together. This has made me learn that we have to shoot a shot more than once otherwise if we miss an error with a particular shot while shooting, if we later discover that error and are unable to use it we do not have to go back out on location and re shoot it again, we can just use one of the other shots we shot on the day. This would not only be better for the time schedule but also the continuity of our sequence because it is harder to get something to look the same several days after. 

I have learned that managing your time is also extremely important during the process of shooting, planning and editing a sequence. We had to anticipated that getting our sequence just right would take so long therefore we ended up being slightly rushed for time towards the end. When conducting our real piece of coursework i would therefore plan my time a lot better and allow time for correcting errors and re-shooting which we had not planned for. I also have a better idea of how long it takes to construct a sequence therefore i will not be too ambitious as i know now that it is far more complicated and time consuming than i had originally thought. 

I learnt during this project the importance of being able to adapt to problems and situations. During our shoot we had to adapt to many things due to the disruptions in our locations and lack of time and space. When carrying out the final coursework i will know that the best thing to do when encountering a problem is not panic and waste time worrying, instead just think of an alternative that will work just as well and therefore adapting is much more beneficial in the long run, although it may seem a nuisance at the time. 

Overall this project has helped me to gain the confidence to feel positive about moving onto our coursework project. I have learned many beneficial things from this exercise and i can carry this knowledge through to the main project and therefore hopefully create something more successful. I feel that from this exercise i can progress forward and learn from my mistakes that i have made in this project so that my main one will be fault less. It has really been a useful exercise and helped me understand the processes of making a sequence a lot better so that making the real thing will not seem as daunting or as big a challenge. I now feel i can tackle it optimistically.