Evaluation of Preliminary Task

Georgia Phillips

During the preliminary task we encountered a few problems along the way.

We chose our action to be shot in the C block toilets, but realised once we had got most of our footage that we were unable to do a long shot because the toilet space was too small. Although we thought this was an issue we then realised that our establishing shot was also a long shot too so this was not an issue after all.

During editing we found out that we were not allowed to have explicit swearing in our piece. Because we did have a lot of swearing we had to think of a way to get round it without having to re-film. We decided to try and 'bleep' it out by lowering the volume at certain points. We found this quite difficult as a group because we were not used to the software but when we eventually worked it out it looked effective and flowed with the piece.

From doing the preliminary task I learnt how to use the software and I am now much more confident. I also learnt how to change the films into a QucikTime so we are able to upload the footage onto our blogs. During this process I also learnt how to use the blog and update it regularly. I learnt that editing plays a massive part in making the film flow, if we did not edit properly then the task would not have been continuous therefore it would not have worked.

In conclusion, I think we as a group worked well together and covered everything we needed to cover in order to pass the preliminary task. Doing the task has given me a taste for what's to come and I am looking forward to creating the opening sequence to a children's film.

Francesca Hazel

Overall our sequence for the preliminary task worked quite well although we did encounter some problems when filming and editing afterwards. We had to incorporate a conversation into the sequence so we chose to use two girls having an argument and decided to use the girls bathroom as our setting as it is a typical place for events like this to occur. When filming we found it hard to get all the shots we needed as there was limited space in the small bathroom, however we overcame this by using the corridor outside to shoot our long shot.

The filming went well as we re shot some of the shots again if were weren't 100% happy with them, giving us the chance to choose the best afterwards and i think the shots we used worked well, especially the over the shoulder shots during the argument and when Hollie slapped Georgia. At times it was hard to keep the camera steady when filming shots that we couldn't use the tripod for but this didn't affect the shot too much.

When we came to editing our shots and creating the sequence it was hard to place the shots together and edit the duration so that the conversation flowed. It sounded unnatural as they had been shot seperately so it took lots of cutting down the shots and lining them up until we could make the conversation flow naturally. The continuity shot was similar as it had to be cut at a precise point to make it flow from the shot before, but we managed to fix this. Another problem we encountered was the speech in our sequence as we had to remove the swear words. It took a while to get used to the software used to edit sound, but in the end we managed to dip the sound level so that the swear words were inaudible.

I think our group worked well together as everyone had there own ideas and when we put them all together and incorparated them into our sequence we were happy with the result. The preliminary task helped us all the get more experience with the software and i now feel more confident using it.

Kiera Roseberry


During our preliminary task we had a few problems but overall the project went well and our sequence came out well. The main problem we had was during filming, we had to encorperate many different shot types, which included a long shot. As we chose to film our girl fight sequence in the girls toilets we realised that shooting a long shot was going to be difficult as the toilets are only small, we resolved this by using the establishing shot in the corridoor as our long shot too.

Another problem we had was continuity, we had a few issues when hollie was coming through the door and we had one shot one side of the door and one on the other side, but we resolved this in editing, and also when Hollie slaps Georgia it ws hard to get the over the shoulder shot of georgia being slapped and the shot before of the front of Hollie about to slap her.

After filming we uploaded our sequence and started editing, one of the problems we faced was cutting down each part and then sitll keeping it in sync. Another problem with editing was cutting out the couple of swearwords in the fight scene, this was hard to do as we only wanted to mute on word and no the whole sentance other wise it wouldnt make sense, we couldnt do this at first but then we zoomed into the part we were muting so that we could make a more accurate change to it.

I think during this task we worked very well as a group and we all learned new things about filming and the camera equipment and we also gained further knowledge of how to use the macs and how to edit our sequences which will help us when we do our other sequences in the future.