The document discusses the author's learning and growth over the course of creating film projects. It explains how understanding genres and their codes/conventions improved her preliminary project. Through work experiences editing human rights films and tutorials, she learned continuity editing, color correction, and creating coherent narratives. Analyzing professional film clips helped her advance in cinematography, using more camera angles and movement. While quality hindered audience experience, she was proud of her cinematography skills. The author also felt she greatly improved at using sound, like layering dialogue in one scene, through experimentation.

1.  
Esther Rowe

2. Over the scope of this unit I’ve come to understand the
importance of the codes and conventions of a genre in
appealing to an audience. Without codes and conventions, a
film can easily be undefinable, leading to it having less appeal
– the preliminary project is a key example of that. However for
my preliminary I chose to make a romantic short film in order
to let myself experiment more with filming, so I was able to
access the codes and conventions. However it has been
interesting to look at different genres, the thriller particularly.
I definatly think that there is a difference in the definition of
the genre between my preliminary task and my piece now, as I
have come to understand the importance of research in a
genre.

3. Over the course I have taken on various work experience
placements in my spare time, one, working for an editing
company that makes human rights films on human trafficking
in India. This helped me to understand continuity editing and
other techniques a lot more, the difficulty of editing with sound
an also the ways to create a coherent narrative.
I also learnt a lot through private research, looking at video
bloggers such as Indy Mogul who give tutorials to amateur film
makers. I found this helped me to progress in terms of colour
correction as well as continuity editing and cutaways.

4. Throughout this project, by analysing film clips and the way
that industry professionals use their cameras I think that I
have come very far in my knowledge and use of
cinematography. In my piece I definatly explored a lot more
camera angles as well as camera movement that I had not
been used to before and this really shaped me as a film
maker. However it is a shame that the quality of the film
hinders the experience for the audience, who, unlike in the
H.D preliminary project, will miss out on various aspects of the
cinematography that I was extremely proud of in my creative
process.

5. I feel like I have improved drastically in the area of sound. In
my preliminary project I mainly used music in order to keep a
flow of the narrative however I really pushed myself in my
thriller to use dialogue as well as sound. Something that I
really loved doing was layering the sound, there is a moment
in scene 2 where Annabelle is in the bath and the dialogue
from scene 1 echoes around the shot. This involved a lot of
sound layering and sound editing in order to maker the voices
lower and give them an echoic resound. This was a time
consuming experience but I feel that I learnt a lot and I love
the product, this was all learnt through experimentation and
using my initiative.