Question 7Looking back at your preliminary what do you feel you have learnt in the progression to the full product?

By Zoe Fisher

Prelimary research

– Due to the fact a prelimary is a planning technique it is short. It helped with the planning steps of our opening sequence because it helped us avoid breaking technique rules.

– From doing our prelimary I decided that i wanted to be the cinematographer because it is a hard role that takes a lot of thinking and planning but I thought I had to skills and determination to do this and it worked to my strengths.

– Me and my group researched into preliminary ‘s including rules techniques and existing prelimarys. This was important so that we had a baseline and an idea into time and techniques for the process of making our opening sequence.

Prelimary review 180° rule

– When making our prelimary we had to consider the 180° rule. This is where the when shooting a scene you can’t go over 180° past the line you first shot from. It has to stay on one side of he action. When doing our prelimary we had to plan so that we didn’t cross this rule. This keeps composition and structure for both characters and the audience. This was important to learn about in our preliminary because it would help to avoid breaking the guidelines in our final opening sequence. This rule allows framework and means the camera has to stay on one side of the frame/ where the characters are placed.

Shot reverse shot - A shot reverse shot is where one character is looking

at another and then that character is seen looking back at the first character.

- When we had made our prelimary we has to think about weather we wanted to use this technique or not. With our final planning of our sequence we decided not to show the antagonistic face and that the audience would only see his arms so we didn’t use shot reverse shot.

- Watching back at our final product I am glad with the decision that we made. As they worked effectively and continuity was kept.

The editing process

– Our preliminary helped our opening sequence because the research that we had done also helped with the editing process as we was able to learn about straight cuts and how we can change the speed depending on the situation and motion you want the audience to feel.

– We also learnt about added effects where we could add a visual color/effect sheet over the footage that we had took, because we was able to pre look at these editing effects this helped us to think about what we wanted to use for our opening sequence from the start.

What I have learnt – From the making the preliminary to our final product I have learnt about several

techniques and processes that we had undergo through the development of our opening sequence.

– I learnt about frame work and where things are placed and what is seen within the shot. This is important because it is vital to get this right as it is what the audience will initially see and will be looking at all areas of frame.

– I learnt about editing software and how we can add effects which we had done with our opening sequence and I believe that this made our opening sequence look visually more effective and professional and this may not have been as creative if we hadn’t have done our preliminary and found out about these techniques at the begining. This is shown in the second picture to the left. The top picture is where we added a shimmer fade over th top and this gave a great effect to our opening sequence.

Problems that occurred when filming our Prelimary

– We had some issues when filming our preliminary. We hadn’t thought about equipment. So at the beginning we did not collect a tripod so the footage wasn’t stable which we correct on the second attempt but made us also to think about this weakness that occurred when it came to our opening sequence which meant we avoided this problem happening again.

– When we filmed out preliminary we had Megan walk through a door into a room, in the editing process we had to make sure continuity was accurate and that clips didn’t jump, everything had to be smooth and scenes had to flow in and out of transitions effectively. Continuity is important with any film making as everything has to connect together otherwise audience would miss things and not stay within the storyline or narrative. This helped us to see problems to help avoid when we was making our opening sequence and also helped with getting to grips with the editing system and post-production and so that we had experience with the software and how editing clips together takes time which is what we need to make sure was available when making our opening sequence.

– The screen grabs on the left are images that I have taken from our preliminary, they show the transition between when Megan opens the door and lets go of the door as she enters the room, when editing this we made sure we hadn’t cut any sections out or that any parts jumped in post-production.

Continued… – When making our preliminary we made all of our footage in focus and used the normal

camera with no effects. When we did this we didn’t instantly think about going against this technique in our opening sequence, but in the process we also new that having parts blurry would be effected as it suits our genre and scene perfectly. When we came to filming we had already started by the time our teacher told us about effect slides that can go over the camera lens. When we did look at these we made some footage using this device and without so that we had the option of using it, but if we did this again we would use this into account and use the effect slides at the beginning so we had more options.

– When making our preliminary we only had diegetic sound which came from the characters and at this stage hadn’t thought about music or sound. This may have helped with time when it came with our opening sequence as we may have been able to access sound and music early this way we would have had more time to look for a variety.

How it helped

– It was more difficult to make our opening sequence than it was to make our Prelimary because there was more techniques needed to make it effective and the duration of our preliminary was only short.

– Making a preliminary helped as it made us aware of difficult tasks and brought to our attention things that we may not have noticed further into the making of our preliminary. Also it was a lot quicker to think of a narrative for our preliminary as it was a lot shorter and had less content.

– Individually it really helped and effected me as it made me realise that I want to be behind the camera and having the power to try new things and see how added equipment could make our opening sequence effective.

Question 7

– By Zoe Fisher