By comparing his preliminary task to the final product, the author learned several things: 1) Equipment limitations like a shaky phone camera were improved with a tripod, making shots steadier and more professional. 2) Editing weaknesses around inconsistent lighting and "jumpy" cuts were addressed in the final product. 3) Acting skills improved from not looking at the camera and breaking the "fourth wall." 4) Sound issues from background noise were fixed using editing tools to add proper sound effects. 5) Overall, the author feels he has gained valuable skills in areas like post-production, equipment use, and filmmaking techniques to make the final product more polished and enjoyable to watch

1. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you
have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
James Carter

2. Preliminary Task
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjVKOfp2ZfU

3. Our Opening sequence
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvl_MsRKnIk

4. Weakness In Preliminary
When looking back at our preliminary task we can see many different weakness that we have
improved first off being the camera because we used a IPhone 4 camera phone which isn't
brilliant. From using the iPhone camera it Is very shaky and with it being shaky shows its not a
professional film. Also in our preliminary task there is a tracking shot of Lewis walking towards
the door as James is and then cutting to a close up of James hand opening the door. With this
shot we could either cut to different shot or use the zooming in feature on the camera to then
zoom in to make it look more affective. In our preliminary task we struggled with keeping the
camera straight and from not shaking this was because we didn’t use a tri pod however when it
comes to making the real media opening sequence we can use a tri pod and set up our shots so
they are perfect this will then make our film look more professional.
Also when looking back at our preliminary task we saw that through the sequence that the sound
goes up and down and sometimes isn't very clear this is because the microphone is in the phone
and its not next to the character when speaking also it picks up different noises if they re closer
and in our preliminary task there is a car beeping in the back ground which distorts the dialogue
in the piece. Throughout this makes the sound differ all the way throughout and looks similar to
the rest which doesn’t look professional.

5. Weakness In Preliminary
• By looking at our post production edit, we could see that certain aspects
of our edit were not up to scratch. We could see that the editing was
very jumpy and looks uncomfortable between shots. We also struggled
with consistency within our preliminary task, mainly because when the
shots cut, there was a different amount of light.
In our preliminary task, our acting skills were not as good as in our final
film, the reason being our actors look at the camera which causes them
to laugh. This is something that made our film seem unrealistic and
means our actors are breaking the fourth wall. The audience think that
the actors are interacting with them which is not something that we
intended to do.

6. How We Overcome These In Our Final Film
• Unsteady and shaky shots – After reviewing our footage, we knew straight away by using a tripod
our shots were going to look better. For example, when doing a panning shot of the gun, we used a
tripod. This created a better effect as the gun went in and out of focus which made it look more
threatening. By using the tripod, our final piece looked much more like a big budget film.
• Zooming – When we realised the camera had a zooming function we found it much easier to take a
tracking shot by having this technology it made our opening sequence look more professional. When
doing a zooming shot in our film it didn’t look good mainly because the shot was held for to long so
instead we changed this for a variety of different shots such as mid shots, long shots and close up
we made used these shots to get the characters emotions from a range of different shots.
• Sound – When watching the preliminary task we could see that the shots differed in sound. By
seeing this we researched the ways you can post product, the software we are using for editing
final cut pro is a fine way to make your shots look and sound good. One way was adding sound
affects over the top to do this we deleted the sound on the clip and then added in sound affects.
We also used lip sinking which was used in our final piece.

7. How We Overcome These In Our Final Film
• Editing/Post production – When we came to editing the final product
together we knew that we would need to know the different ways of
adding slow motions and transitions we taught ourselves with some
random shots and then played around with them in final cut pro so when
we came to our real editing we wasn't wasting time and our coursework
would look good.
• Acting- First off in our preliminary task the acting wasn’t very good
because the actors didn’t seem very enthusiastic. For our final piece I
knew myself with a very out going personality would love to do some
acting, also in our group we had Lewis who does A level drama and this
helped us because we could talk to him about making our film look
professional also how not to break the fourth wall.

8. What we have learnt
• Overall from our preliminary task to our final piece if you had spoken to
myself 3 months ago I was new to media and film making and didn’t
have much of a clue but now three months on I feel I have made big
steps in the right direction and im really looking forward to taking on
year 13.
• We have learnt many skills within post production such as effects,
transitions, special effects, colour grading and voice overs. We have also
learnt about the different equipment we have at school and with these
we have tried to make our film looks as realistic as possible by making
our shots look steady and unshaken.
• Finally with all these techniques we have made our film a pleasure to
watch for the audience and had some good feedback.