Neve's evaluation question 7

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
Dan, Ross, Sophie and Neve's Foundation Portfolio: Our Completed Prelim Film- Neve and Sophie's prelim
Neve,Ross's,Dan's.Sophie's final piece.(video)

prelim lighting

 For our prelim our group was split in two, i was with Sophie and Allan, and Ross and Dan were together, so coming together as a group has improved our final pieces as we put all of our knowledge together and made sure we didn't repeat mistakes we had made previously.

Lighting in our prelim vs final piece 

final piece lighting

The lighting in our prelim was very limited, not using spotlights was a mistake we made because this made the scenes all the same, it was filmed inside so we didn't have natural lighting either. it was very dark and the quality wasn't great (as shown below). the lighting in our prelim was low key lighting from classrooms by the art department, This wasn't ideal however we didn't have lighting with us, as shown below we used an iphone for lighting in some parts of our prelim this was a big mistake as it affected the quality of the images and the audience cant see the characters properly which is not ideal. for our final piece we used battery powered LED lights without filters, this created a much better affect as is clearly shown below. the lighting in our final piece is low key however it creates the effect we wanted, it also gives the scene a creepy feel to it.

lighting for final piece

lighting for prelim

In our final piece we used natural lighting as it was outside in the morning however we also used the lighting equipment we used for other scenes to keep continuity. we didn't use lighting stands for our prelim which had a negative affect on the lighting,however we did use lighting stands in our final piece, this made the lighting remain steady and equal throughout the scenes. the lighting is much crisp and brighter in our final piece making the quality look even better.

Costume
In our prelim we didn't go into detail with  the costumes, both characters wore what they would usually wear, This did however fit with our story line but could have been better, the main character in our prelim was wearing jeans and a red hoodie and the antagonist was wearing jeans and a pattern t-shirt however this wasn't obvious in the film.

prelim costume

final piece costume

both costumes look similar however the final piece costume is better because it is scruffier and the actor has the look we were aiming for, his hair and makeup was done to fit the narrative,unlike our prelim we didn't use any makeup. we thought a lot about how to dress our characters, for the main character we initially decided to use a hospital gown we changed this because the gown was hard to get hold of and we did research about mental health  hospitals and realised they don't wear hospital gowns. so we decided to put the character in scruffy camouflage trousers and a dark hoodie with scruffy looking trainers, i think with mise en scene (makeup and costume) i improved from our prelim with planning it and putting the plans into action.

camerawork
in our prelim we used a range of different shots and transitions though this is usually a good thing i think we used to many when we didn't really need to, i think this has improved in our final piece because we have used a range of different shots however we haven't over used them to make it look to busy. we had two close up shots of the protagonists hand opening doors, as these were a few seconds apart it looks a bit confusing and disorientates the audience as to where the character is and their positioning. our prelim is also a much faster pace and demands all of the audiences attention otherwise it may get confusing, we have improved on this in our final piece because we have used a range of shots,transitions, and angles but not to many.

second door shot

first door shot

in our prelim we practised the 180 degree rule a few times before we got it right however we didn't have a scene where we would be able to apply the 180 degree rule and show what we had learnt/improved, an improvement to our final piece would be to use what we have learnt about the 180 degree rule especially in conversation.

following character to destination 

pan from final piece

most of our shots are panning shots of our main character in the final piece, i think this is better than than following the protagonist in our prelim because this doesn't show the characters facial expression and emotions whereas in our final piece pan shots the audience can see facial expression and body language. through using this pan the audience can also see the setting better and the shot not be so focused on the main character like in our prelim.
in our prelim we used more cuts which i personally find boring unless its in a fast pace sequence which our prelim wasn't, we used some fades and wipe transitions in our final piece that i think would have worked well in our prelim instead of using lots of cuts.

Angles and transitions and effects

wipe to next shot

effect 1

in our prelim we didn't plan in detail what angles we would use or particularly stick to the storyboard, we ended up with having to think on the spot whilst trying to manage our characters, this could have been much easier if we had planned properly, however we planned in more detail for the final piece, we planned exactly what angles and shots we were going to use and the transition we would edit in. we tried to use continuity editing techniques e.g when the male walks in front of the character, this was a wipe,i think this worked well because it makes the audience notice the transitions rather than watching without taking any notice of the usual cuts. we also used a fade to white and fade back to a blurry image, the effects we used in our final piece work well with the narrative. i feel we should have used effects in the prelim to make it more interesting and create suspense. (effects below)

effect 2

effect 3

effect 4

Editing in our prelim vs final piece.

effect 5

For our prelim we didn't edit as much as we should have, if we had we could have sorted the lighting issue out, used colour correction, used more transitions this would have massively improved our sequence because it looks poor quality while some of the quality issues wasn't our fault, we could have made more changes to it. in our final piece we took much longer to edit to make sure it was just the way we wanted it to be we also experimented with lots of different effects on the images to make them seem disorientated trying to get it just right wasn't easy. we used colour correction in the woods to make the scene feel brighter and the image a better quality.

Sound
In our prelim we recorded the dialogue at the same time, doing this was a mistake we made because we were filming a stairwell that echoed and made the voices sound out of place, however adding the voices after might as well have created an undesired effect as there would be a slight echo, that we wouldn't get recording somewhere else. we also had non diegetic drum beats to build suspense however looking back on this i can see it doesn't fit the narrative or the indoors setting, i think a different background song would have been better.
in our final piece our sound was all recorded after the filming and the sounds that would have been in the shot were replaced by edited versions and enhanced,such as the birds in the trees we added after filming so we could heighten every little sound to add to his mental state. we used a similar instrumental song in both our films however the song corruption fits our final piece much better. i think we could have spent more time trying to find a song that fit our prelim narrative better.
overall on sound for our prelim it wasnt great and could have been improved.

Image quality

bad quality

The image quality in our prelim isn't very good the pictures blurry and because the lighting is also bad we cant see a great deal, the quality begins to improve through the prelim however its still not great, we overcame the problem of  bad quality images because the camera was much better and managed to get the depth of field. also as there was more colour in our final piece it makes the quality look better.

good quality

Overall I think as a group we have improved greatly and as we were in separate groups we have come together and brought all of our knowledge together and improved since our prelim. I think the biggest problem with our prelim was the lighting and quality and for our final piece I feel we have greatly improved it.