Evaluation Question 7- Sophie

Evaluation Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

Preliminary Task: http://foundationportfolio201667.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/our-completed-prelim-film.html

Our Final Product, NOOSE: http://foundationportfolio201667.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/our-finished-film-noose.html

We have improved vastly from our preliminary task, there are many reasons as to why this is and after looking back at our preliminary video I have seen many things we didn’t achieve, however have now achieved in our final product.

 In our preliminary video I noticed that the quality wasn’t brilliant and I saw that the colouring was slightly off, and quite green. In this screengrab you can see that the wall and door of the shot is off  colour, this is a result of not setting the white balance. We realised that not setting the white balance caused the colouring to go off slightly and make the overall piece bad quality. In our final project, Noose, we set the white balance before every shot and found that it had a much more positive effect and made our film a lot better quality. This next screengrab is of our final film, where we set the white balance.

I also noticed that, in our preliminary video, we didn’t use any lighting and relied on the natural lighting of the corridor and rooms that we were in. However, this shows to have been a bad idea because the lighting was very dark, therefore we can’t really see much in our video.  For example, in this screen grab it shows a shot of our film where our actor walks through

the corridor. You can’t really see what’s going on, and you cannot see facial expressions etc, which means that it’s rather difficult to tell what the story line is. Not only that, but the lighting coming through the windows of the doors makes a bad affect and creates only little stripes of lighting. Therefore, in our final video we used the proper LED lights to light up the area, even in pure daylight, this is because we can’t have any shadowing that’s not wanted. We also filmed in the dark for some of the film so we needed to use the lights to light up the surrounding area and to be able to see the actors clothing as it was really important for the role he was portraying. This screen grab is of one of the dark areas that we filmed, it’s lit up by an LED light as well as a street lamp. This works well as you can see the area very well, also the lighting is good enough to be able to see the actor. 

The camerawork in our preliminary video was mainly hand held, which had a bad affect on the quality of our video as it was rather shakey and made the whole video difficult to edit. In our final project video we improved a lot in out camera work skills and decided to use a tripod for all of our shots, including the establishing shot at the beginning; for this we used a band on the arm of the tripod to move it smoothly to give the shot a nice finish. 

We analysed our preliminary editing and realised that there wasn't much to our film editing, other than the simple cut transition. For our final project we used different transitions which proved a success. The sound editing in our preliminary video was also a big mistake we made, as a group we decided not to edit the sound properly and just left it as it was. Unfortunately, you could hear a lot of muffling   and talking in the background. Therefore, when editing the sound for our final project film we did a lot of research for parallel sound. We decided to completely cut out the sound and edit over by using garageband sound effects and a sound recorder for the voices in our video. This also proved to be a very good idea and gave a positive affect on our video in the end.

A slight problem in our preliminary video was organising costume, we were unable to get any of the actors to wear specific clothing, unfortunately we couldn't get access to make-up either so that made a bad affect as the story line may have been unclear. In this screen grab you can see that our actor isn't particularly wearing any costume or make-up. However, in our final project video we made sure our actor was wearing clothing that was quite casual but scruffy to make him look like a mental hospital patient. We also used make-up for blood on our dead character, also our main character needed make-up to look tired and like he had previously been on drugs, also to make him look sweaty from running. We really improved on costume and make-up as we didn't use any in our preliminary film, however we used it to a great extent in our final project which proved to have a really good affect.