Evaluation Question - 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
-Planning and Research - Looking back on my preliminary task, I would say that I have learnt a lot from my full project. The difference between the two individual tasks is significant. For instance, for my preliminary task, my group and I thought about what to do, carried out what we intended to do, edited and uploaded the video to our blogs all in the same day. However, for our actual project, we has to do weeks of planning and audience research in order to prepare for out project to be completed. Storyboards, scripts and video questionnaires also had to be completed so that we knew exactly what we where going to do and how we were going to do it. We had to conduct research on other films that are similar to ours so we could make some comparisons between our plans and how other films of that genre are made. For instance, something that took some time for my group for our opening sequence was the script. When we completed our preliminary task, we didn't need a script, we only had about 5 lines of dialouge and even though there was no speech in my opening sequence, we still needed a script for it.
-Location - For our preliminary task we was able to just use a free room which we found in the college. However, for our actual project, it was a whole different story. First of all, we had planned on trying to persuade a hotel to allow us to use a room with a good view of London. This would have been the ideal location for us, but unfortunately we wasn't able to persuade any hotel to let us use any of their rooms. Therefore, we had to try and find somewhere else for us to use. Fortunately, we was able to find a good location for us to use and the final result is just as good as we had envisioned with using a hotel room.
-Time/Effort - Another thing that I have learnt from comparing both my preliminary task and my actual completed project is how time consuming the whole process is. Me and my group were able to film and edit my preliminary task within the same afternoon, as well as come up with the idea for it, not that is was complicated by any means. However, it has taken weeks for my group and I to actually film and edit our opening sequence. Based on our preliminary task, I presumed that our project wouldn't take long for us to complete, but that was wrong on a huge scale. A lot of time and effort was needed in order for our project to be a success and I didn't expect it to be at such a high level, but it was and it is now completed. For instance, our preliminary task was all completed within one day, one lesson even, but for our actual project, we started planning in late January; 2 months ago! Considering our project was finally completely only recently, 2 months for a 2 minute video is an awful lot of time. Considering our preliminary task is only about 1/7th of our final project, it took us about 50/60 days less time.
-Precaution- Also, I have learnt not to rush things in the process of film making. In our preliminary task, we just got it out the way as soon as we could, which benefitted us in the instance that we was able to concentrate on other aspects of our course, but not so much in the region of quality of our first task. Had we planned a little bit more and took our time with it, we would have been able to undermine any errors which may had occured in our preliminary task. However, taking our time with our actual project allowed us to intercept the mistakes before they were able to get into our project. Therefore, being able to take your time on a project like this is a lot more beneficial than just rushing everything to get it out of the way.
-Directing Actors- For our preliminary task, we didn't exactly have a director, we just done it as we wished. We was able to do whatever we wanted as long as it was fitting to the task at hand. For our actual project, this was very different in comparison. For our project, we needed our cast (in our case just one actor) to do exactly as we wanted and needed in order to complete our task as we had envisioned it. This was crucial for us to get it right as we didn't want to have to repeat the whole process. Directoring the actor to do as we needed him to do wasn't how I had pictured it previously. Telling someone to do the correct action, at the correct time more than once to get it from different angles for editing reasons - match on action - isn't the easiest task for anyone to do. However, we got it correct and that is what we needed.