Question 7 for our OCR media evaluation

1. Leanne,Anthony, Grzegorz

2.  For our preliminary task we were asked to take a shot
of a person walking to a door, opening the door,
sitting down on a chair and exchanging a couple of
pieces of dialog. Once we were told this and was given
a set structure of what we had to create we decided to
start with creating a storyboard.This not only helped
us in the creation of the preliminary task but also in
the production of our final product. We found the
storyboard extremely useful as it gave us the starting
blocks of what the task would look like, it allowed us
as a group to look at what we were going to do and
also let us use it to explain to the actors what was
happening in each shot.

3.  For planning aside from making a storyboard, we did not
undertake a large amount of planning for our preliminary task.
This affected not only our time management but our overall
production of work.When going to record we found ourselves
struggling to find a place to film and had to re-evaluate what we
were going to do and ended up booking a room to use but this was
a longer process and one that could have been avoided easily. For
this mistake we had learnt from it and tried to improve it for our
opening sequence, we wanted everything to be perfect so after
locating a place to film we then confirmed that room to be booked
and filled out all the paper work i.e. risk assessment etc.This
allowed us to not only be more efficient and effective with our
work but furthermore meant that there was less mistakes and
made the overall filming process run more smoothly.

4.  Most of us in our group has not filmed in a very long time so
getting used to the certain camera techniques became difficult. Its
very hard to learn techniques like 180 degree rule without having
experienced it yourself, the preliminary task allowed us to do this.
It gave us the opportunity to practice basic but important shots
that would be vital for our opening sequence.When filming the
preliminary task we would record the footage and then see if we
could improve it in anyway e.g. moving camera more the the right
on a over the shoulder shot to see character more clearly etc. It
was topics like these that really helped us in the creation of the
opening sequence as when it came to filming the final product we
only had one day to record the ‘murder scene’ (due to our group
only being able to rent out the scene we recorded in for one day)
which meant that there was little room for error.The preliminary
task reduced the amount of amateur mistakes we would have
made on the opening sequence so this helped us a great deal.

5.  When editing our preliminary task we began to familiarize
ourselves with our chosen video editing software iMovie. Like
filming, our group has also not done editing in a long time so it
was vital that we had some practice before we began to create
the final product.The preliminary task gave us that
opportunity; combined with this practice and also doing online
research into different editing techniques we were able to use
the preliminary task as a starting point to create a number of
different editing techniques in our final product. Without this
practice and knowledge we would not have been able to
product as good quality editing in our opening sequence so the
preliminary task helped us immensely in this area.