Hannah Jolley - Evaluation: Question 7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Looking back at our preliminary task, I feel that we have developed our skills of filming and editing and overall have progressed.

In our preliminary task, we had a few shots which were well composed but some of them we didn't look in detail enough to see whether the composition of the shot was accurate.

For example, the screenshot on the right shows how in some parts of the film there are people in the background which ruins the composition of the shot.

 Although, I think some shots we did were well composed and we managed to use some conventions of a Thriller including the contrast of light and shadows. I think our storyboarding of our preliminary task wasn't detailed enough and as a group, we learnt to take more care over each shot with its length/angle etc when it came to our opening so we would get the best result.

The screenshot on the left shows how the darkness of the doors and the silhouette contrast nicely with the natural light coming from the window, creating a mysterious figure.

The screen shot on the right shows how we didn't look carefully enough at how Heeral was positioned in the shot, as part of her head is cut off. Some of the door frames also don't look straight which makes the shot look a bit out of proportion.






The still to my left shows that we managed to get a good composition in this shot of Heeral's feet, because the line of the floor is straight and her feet are pretty central in the shot.

I have learnt from this that you should always check the lines and positioning of everything within the composition of a shot to get it right and to make it look the best it can, I tried to follow this  through when filming our opening sequence as I didn't want to be disappointed with how our final footage looked when in post production.

When Heeral walks through the door and sits down, we used match on action for good continuity, I think we did this well in editing it but the sound isn't continuous when the shots cut from one to another and so when editing our final product, I wanted to make sure that any audio/soundtrack was continuous, even if we didn't include dialogue.

We used match on action here in our final product when Maya gets out of bed, I think we did this well and we learnt these useful skills when in post production of our Preliminary task, I think it flows nicely and fits well.

The strategies that were useful in our storyboarding for the real product were that we knew exactly how we wanted each shot to look, whereas with our preliminary task, we were still planning in our heads whilst filming which wasn't a good way to do it as we weren't confident in what we were filming but as we developed our planning skills, it mean that for the real product we all knew when we had filmed the shot right.

We used match on action in this shot also, but I noticed in post production that Maya puts the pills in her hand and goes to put them in her mouth with the palm of her hand but in the shot above, she is seen taking the pills with her fingers. This wasn't very noticeable to a few people I asked as audience, but it is still a slight continuity error.

These are a few screen shots of our final product where I think we have used good composition skills.