Evaluation - Question 7 - Sophie

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

From the transition from the preliminary task to the full project, one thing I feel I have better understanding of is the importance and effect of detailed pre-production planning. I found that our planning for the full project (probably due to me changing group) has been a lot more effective and have therefore made the filming and editing a lot smoother. 

 For example, this (left) is the blog post I wrote during the preliminary planning. This differs a lot from the detailed, longer explanation of the costume choices for the main task. Although we managed to find a costume just fine in the prelim, I found it was helpful for me to have to think deeper in the full project about the costumes in order to get a better understanding of the character and film.

Another example is the story boarding / shot listing. In the prelim task we made a very basic story board with not many annotations (right) and did not make a shot list. We found this made the filming quite difficult as we had little structure to go off of. In contrast, In the main task we made a detail story board, along side a specific shot list (including shot times, movements, what was in the frame, and music), with an overview of the rest of the film's plot (we did this so we could have a greater understanding for the opening of the film and the characters etc - and also to make sure the whole group understood the story). This made a massive difference in the speed of filming and editing, and also the whole groups understanding of the films plot, characters and story. In addition we made two animatics for our main task, this consisted of one with images of each shot with the exact times, and another with verbal commentary on each shot; talking through the shot size, content, sound etc. This, being something that I didn't do with my previous group for the prelim task, is something that helped with the pace of filming and editing process massively, especially where we forgot details of specific shots and could reference back to the animatics. In addition, It gave us all a greater understanding of the opening and our aims as a group before we began the filming process.

Camera work
I have definitely grown in my ability to use a camera. Techniques such as tracking, panning, tilting and forming an arc shot were all techniques I didn't have to use during the prelim task, which made it quite challenging at first. We definitely under estimated how hard some of the shots would be, for example; tracking the girl while she was running before coming to a halt behind her when she stopped, I found this difficult as we had to replicate the motion of someone who would have been following her however we couldn't make it to shaky, also we had to get the timing of her stopping and us stopping correct in order to achieve the effect we wanted. We took this shot at least 4/5 times, all of the group having a go, and we eventually got it. This was the same with certain panning shots, tilts and especially when we were panning a whole 360' around our actress, this became difficult as we had to hold the right distance from her, angle, height and speed. Overall, with regards to camera work, I feel like I have developed in my ability to film & create camera movements.

Visual Editing 
As how the group roles turned out, I ended up doing a large part of the visual editing, this was fine with me as editing is something that I enjoy and have done in the past. I had never used Final Cut Pro before this course, so my familiarity with Final Cut is definitely something that has developed through the course of this work. Specifically, I have definitely grown in my understanding of continuity when editing, with our main subject being a girl running through the woods, continuity was crucial with aspects of mise en scene like her location in the woods, her positioning in the frame, the weather at the time and also the use of techniques like match on action. 
One technique which we used which I hadn't done before was a graphic match (this was between the flash back of the mans shadowed face and the present still shot of the women by the stream). 
In addition, I have had to use effects such as transitions to create specific effect (hallucinations and feeling faint). This took me a few trials and errors however in the end, I created this effect by taking 2 second long, random POV shots of the character running through the woods and playing them straight after each other to create the effect of a hallucination. To finish this off I decided to add the transition 'fade to white' at the end of every clip, this creating a flashing light effect which replicated the feeling of passing out / feeling faint.