Preliminary Task Evaluation

We had great fun making it but of course had some troubles along the way! Here is the evaluation of our task:

I think our main strength is teamwork. We each had our own job in the group and worked well together, helping each other and being loyal to the group by completing the jobs we had to do. I was the camera operator and editor, this meant I had to arrange all of the filming and then put all the clips together to edit the film. I think the hardest part of this was putting the sound effects on. It was a struggle to put edit the sound effects into the film as once I had chosen them, I had to put them into the film so that the sound matched the action. This was tricky because I had to get it just right otherwise it was obviously edited, and this wasn't the look I was going for. Another thing that I found surprisingly difficult was the timeframe. We all planned what we were going to do before going out and doing it, however I had no idea how long it would take us to film all the clips. This is because we needed each clip to be perfect before it could be used, therefore we had to take at least 15 recordings of each shot, which took a very long time!
Another strength is the shots used, we have included Match On Action, Shot Reverse Shot, 180 Degree Rule and Over The Shoulder shots, all used to effect. We use Shot Revers Shot along with 180 Degree Rule for the conversation in our product between Ellie and Beth. We also used Match On Action through pretty much the whole thing, when Ellie is walking to the meeting there are match on actions of her going through doors and up lifts and after the meeting there are match on action shots of her walking down the stairs.

I think our main weakness was the thought process in the planning. Although most of the planning went well, we originally wanted it all to be in a documentary style, however we did not realise how much the environmental noises would effect this. When we tried to film as a documentary, we listened back on some of the clips and realised the amount of noise that was being caused by things such as wind, other people talking, the microphone being fuzzy and more. Our first thoughts were to record the voices separate from the video and edit them in but then we decided that this would be very tricky and as it was our first task, we probably would have struggled with this much editing. Therefore, we put the idea of a documentary on hold and filmed the main chunk as a normal film. This allowed us to edit the sound out and put sound effects in such as doors closing and lifts working, then the little speech that was in the film was inside and so the noise distractions were not too bad. Then we put in our documentary idea at the end as a little add on. We think that this worked really well in the end because the noise distractions (the wind) in the documentary did not sound too bad as it actually fitted in with the documentary style. However, we are still glad we did not do this the whole was through as the distraction noises would have been too much.

Another change we had to make was one of our settings which was Buckingham lay-by. At the time of filming, this lay-by was full and therefore impossible to film walking in! Therefore, we moved to right outside the school, meaning Ellie had to walk round a slight corner and then up the steps, which wasn't too much of a problem in the end.