Evaluation Question 7

At the beginning of the year I  made a preliminary film. The preliminary film was very basic and we made this short film in order to showcase some shots and angles that we had learnt previously in lessons. To film this we used a very basic film camera which was of quite low quality and didn't have a very good focus. the preliminary film did not have many shots in and had a basic narrative. When it came to editing, it was our first time so the editing was very basic and quite rough. We added a sound track which we downloaded from a royalty free website. The storyboard that we created alongside the filming was also quite basic as it was our first time making a storyboard and we included a few shots and angles. As it was our first time filming the tripod that we used we found it hard to manoeuvre and therefore it was accidently broken whilst filming. The part of the film that was the worst was continuity. Due to the fact that we filmed over two days meant that the actors in it had two different costumes on and made the film look unprofessional.

However when we were filming we did manage to keep the majority of the shots steady therefore that slightly boosted up the quality of the preliminary film. Our teamwork was quite good throughout the filming of the preliminary task- we all worked very hard and listened and respected everyone's ideas.

Over the course of the year I can say that my skills as a media student have increased and developed in extreme amounts. When we created our film opening for Tracks of Damnation my group and myself did a lot of planning so we could create a good narrative and pick a good genre and sub genre that would appeal to our target audience. We also thought a lot about the types of shots and angles we wanted to include in our film. we wanted to have a variety so the audience would always be interested and it would show off our skills as camera men to the examiner.

The quality of camera that we used has developed since we used the flip camera many months ago. The camera that we used for our opening increased the quality of our film dramatically- all of the shots were clear and sharp and appeared well on screen. I have owned the camera for several months which meant that I had a good knowledge of how to operate it- which meant that filming was slightly easier. This was also the same for the tripod- I had used it a few times previously which meant that I understood well how to use it so we had no equipment issues when we were filming.

When we first started to edit we were all a bit unsure about how to piece the clips together so they fitted in well together. However as we started to edit rough cuts and other videos we all became much more confident when it came to editing so we were able to piece together all the clips fluently so the film looked quite professional.

When we made our preliminary film we used a soundtrack downloaded from a royalty free website- we did this because it was the easiest thing to do and was also the simplest. However for Tracks of Damnation we wanted to take a different approach so we decided that we would create our own incidental music. The music that we created was very atmospheric and was created to build tension. The music was created on garage band and was created to match with the clips so the climax matched what would be shown on screen. We did this to showcase more skills which would make our film have a higher quality finish.

In our first film months ago we did not include an ident however in this film to make it look as professional as we could we decided to put in an ident. This would make our production company look legitimate and realistic.

My skills for creating titles have improved vastly since the preliminary film. In the preliminary film we only included one title which was the name of the film. However for this film we included many titles including editing, actors and music. We added animations to the text. We also downloaded a font that could be associated with our genre and sub genre. The title we used in our film made it look more professional and gave it a higher quality.

I think that as a team we worked very well together and we all tried to listen to each others ideas and if we disagreed on something we meet halfway so everyone was happy. We all had a equal part in filming, editing, music and creating the titles. I think that we were all reliable and worked very hard. However we did have some filming issues with our actors and we all began to get very stressed and worried that we would not finished but we had several team meetings and worked soothing out and planned a new narrative which also improved the quality of the film opening.