1. Question 7-
Looking Back At Your Preliminary Task - What
Do You Feel You Have Learnt In The
Progression From It To Full Product?

2. Preliminary Task Film Opening
A continuity task involving filming
and editing:
- A character opening a door
- Crossing a room
- Sitting in front of another character and
exchanging a couple of lines of dialogue
with them.
This task should demonstrate:
- Match on action
- Shot/reverse shot
- - the 180-degree rule
To produce a 2 minute opening sequence
for a fiction film. Your sequence must
include:
- Titles throughout
- Some form of copyright free soundtrack
- Evidence of understanding of continuity
editing
- Clear genre signifiers though characters,
actions, mise en scene, dialogue etc..
Your sequence should be based on:
- A single narrative event or idea
- Only a few characters
- One location ideally

3. Preliminary Task
With the preliminary task we worked through every aspect of production; planning,
filming, editing and evaluating. This gave me an insight into what the project was
going to be about; especially as I had never done Media before.
Planning
• The preliminary task outlined the importance of planning. We looked at different
locations and how viable they would be, we needed to draw up story boards, shot
list and wrote up a sot schedule. All of these provided extremely useful on our
shoot.
• Our main shoot was obviously much more complicated and so our storyboard had
to be much more detailed and precise. The Preliminary Task gave us a taster of the
need to storyboard to ensure a good narrative flow.
• It also highlighted why we needed a shooting schedule, as this enabled us to film
more efficiently. Our main shoot we had many more shoots and time was of the
essence.

4. Roles
• The actual filming process was also something new to me,
so the Preliminary task helped give me an insight into how
everything worked
• When filming we were allocated roles this helped to
organise the shot and make it run smoothly and efficiently.
• When filming our main sequence, we realised the need for
us all to experience all aspects of filming; organising the
shots, setting up for the shot e.g. positioning the camera,
filming and sound, so we were not allocated roles on this
day.
• The Preliminary Task also allowed us to make mistakes,
which could then be avoided when we came to shooting
our real opening.

5. Filming Process
Our preliminary exercise was helpful when filming because it
had helped us familiarise ourselves with the equipment. We
were able to practice different camera angles and shots.
Mid shots
• CU
• Over the shoulder shots
• Tracking shots etc.
This was useful when we were filming as it acted as a base.
However, at the same time it was limited in what it had to
offer as the real shot was a lot more complicated than the
preliminary task and a lot more problems arose.

6. Filming and Editing
• The preliminary task highlighted some obvious
mistakes. As in our task the first shot is horizontal. This
was partly down to editing as we did not know how to
rotate the shot so it was up the correct way and partly
as we shot this clip with the camera held long ways so
we could get all of the door in the shot.
• The preliminary task highlighted the need to make
sure to keep the camera was the correct way as shots
didn’t come out as we had planned and with editing,
make sure we had the skills to resolve problems that
we came across.

7. Storyboard
We did not record times and duration of shots when doing our storyboard for
our preliminary task.
When we filmed our opening we realised the importance of recording times
on the storyboard as we could keep track of how long shots had to be and
when it came to shooting some of the shots were too long or too short.
When editing we could cut the length of the clip or make it longer if we
needed to.

8. Evaluation
• The evaluation of the task was useful as it
allowed us to get a feel for what is needed in
an evaluation and the level of detail. It also
allowed us to look more closely at our
sequence and pick up on faults which could
have easily been avoided.