AS Media Progress from preliminary task to this coursework task. Slideshare by Joseph Grimes The Bishop's Stortford High School United Kingdom

2. PRELIMINARY TASK
Within the preliminary task I believe I didn’t take a hugely major
role. I was put in charge of most of the deconstructions, the
mise-en-scene, the co-director role and I took the role as chief
editor in the post-production stage. The pre-production in our
group certainly wasn’t to the depth and length that we were
aiming to do as we did not exactly have a full understanding of
what the pre-production withheld and what was fully expected
out of the planning and the research. I believe that I have made
terrific progress from the preliminary task, mainly in the pre-
production stage.

3. INITIAL DIFFICULTIES
Initially I really did struggle with the deconstructions. I managed to do a
total of 5 all together that focused on individual scenes from each film
and I analysed the micro-elements of each scene instead of opening
titles as were only producing a sequence from a film genre of our
choice, not specifically the opening. As I didn’t study some of previous
students’ work, I wasn’t fully sure of what amount of detail I needed to
produce in each deconstruction. Therefore, me and my group member,
Beth Pannifer, attempted to do some of the deconstructions together as
we believed that we would benefit from two mindsets and not just one.
However, both of us did still struggle as were not fully sure of what we
actually wanted to include in our own film and therefore, we were
struggling to find key elements that we could emulate in our own film in
each clip we studied. The primary reason for this was that we did not
put enough time into the pre-production and we did not go into the
detail that really would have pushed us to the higher marks and to the
high amount of research that would have been most useful for own
production.

4. PRODUCTION PROGRESS
When me and my partner filmed I believed that I certainly brought much more to
the table than in my preliminary task filming. In this case, I took the role as
the head camera man whilst in the prelim task I only helped direct some of
the shots and what angles to shoot them from. Whilst reflecting on the prelim
project, I notice that I was rather displeased with the framing and the
placement of some of the shots as I believed it looked very unprofessional
and it didn’t make the film look very pleasing to the audience, as we found
out in the feedback. Therefore, in this task I decided to take the role of fully
creating the draft storyboards as I had a number of ideas and concepts for
quite a few diverse angles that would make the film look much more
aesthetically pleasing. We most certainly went into our filming production
much more planned and prepared for what shots and angles we were aiming
to than I was for the preliminary task. This made the filming go much more
smoothly and it gave the actors a more understandable task as we knew
what we wanted them to do from the beginning. In terms of filming
equipment, we did not use a tripod for our preliminary task due to limited
resources and lack of time. This made the film look a lot more unplanned so
in this case I planned ahead of the day and acquired a tripod a few days prior
to filming.

5. EDITING PROGRESS
I believe I mostly progressed in my editing ability in this task. In the prelim
task, we decided not to use any music due to copyright issues and our
struggles with finding a piece of music on the internet that we believed
was very suitable for our film. For this project, I did quite a bit of
research in finding the perfect song to suit our film and our intertextual
reference sequence. I found the song ‘Cleaver Lever’ by ‘The Growl’
which was a song that was produced by an independent artist so I
asked for permission and luckily received it via Facebook messenger. I
believe the progress here was my ability to research in a much more
diverse way. Furthermore, I learnt how to trim shots to just the point
where the dialogue stops and then starts again in order to give the film
a much more smoother flow just like a company produced film. I
noticed that this was a problem in our prelim task as I didn’t effectively
trim the shots to the point where it seemed like the characters in the
film were having a real conversation back and forth without
unnecessary pauses. As a result, my editing techniques overall were
improved by learning more about cutting, adding music and placing
appropriate transitions.

6. CONCLUSION
Overall, I believe that in this task I took a much more major role in the
group by taking over a number of responsibilities and tasks. As we were
only a group of 2, we knew that we had to put in twice as much work
and I think that we did just that. I progressed in all three stages of
production by using much more detailed and diverse research and by
putting twice as much time to polish and edit all my work to the best of
my ability.