what i learned

1. 7. LOOKING BACK AT YOUR
PRELIMINARY TASK, WHAT DO YOU FEEL
YOU HAVE LEARNT IN THE
PROGRESSION FROM IT TO THE FULL
PRODUCT?
Tom Richards

2. RESEARCH:
As during my Preliminary Exercise I
did not need to do a lot of research, I
learnt through the lessons that I
would have to put a lot of work into
my research and make sure that it is
thorough, varied and relevant.
When making the prelim, I learned
how to bubble the tripod, which was
extremely useful in attaining accurate
and high quality shots. During the
Prelim, I used only tripod work, but
for my Foundation Production I had
the freedom to use hand-held
camera angles as well as tripod work
to vary my camera angles. From
doing the Preliminary exercise, I
learnt about the 180 degree rule,
extremely beneficial in constructing
the opening to my film later on.

3. RESEARCH (CONT)
Since creating my preliminary
exercise back in September, I have
learned about the planning, research,
construction and editing of film and
the amount of effort and work
required for each, as I later learnt
that in order to achieve higher marks
and be able to gain inspiration for my
film opening, I used Art of the Title
to watch several different high
quality film openings such as Se7en,
Sherlock Holmes, and Spectre.

4. PLANNING:
During my preliminary exercise, not
much planning was required save
getting people to act with us and plot
out the camera angles and props that
we would be using. This was different
to when we came to construct our
actual film opening, as we realised that
much more planning would be required
if we were ever to finish our film;
Therefore, when we came to plan our
actual film opening we created call
sheets and shot lists so that it was
clear to both me and Matthew what we
would be shooting and when/where we
would need to shoot it. We also
chronicled on our blogs what the Top
Line and Big Question would be for our
opening, as well as what the story of
our opening would be, which we did
not do for our preliminary exercise.

5. CONSTRUCTION:
The construction for our
preliminary exercise was very
simple to do as we did not use a
particularly wide variety of
camera angles (aside from the
required shot reverse shot).
Whereas when we came to
filming our opening, not only
did we use a wider range of
camera techniques, but we also
used a wider range of
equipment, as I used an external
microphone as well as just a
camera and tripod, and I used a
standard dolly in order to
achieve far smoother tracking
shots, of which I didn't even
know existed when I was filming

6. EDITING:
When we came to edit our
preliminary exercise, we used
iMovie as it was a programme
that we had used in GCSE Media
Studies, therefore we were very
familiar with it and knew its
different features, which made it
easy to use and allowed us to
finish editing our prelim
relatively quickly. This was
different when we came to do
the editing for our film opening,
as we decided on using
FinalCut Pro so that we could
prove to the examiner that we
were able to utilise a range of