Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Here is the final cut of our preliminary task; a clip from the thriller, 'Faceless'.



Although our preliminary task was to create a clip from a film and not an opening sequence, and the genre was thriller and not coming-of-age, the same processes applied to both our prelim task and our final AS film opening.

PRE-PRODUCTION 
Location reccies was a big part of the pre-production stage because the location sets the scene for the film, which in turn helps to connote mood and atmosphere, and also helps to tell the audience a little about the narrative:

1. For our prelim, we were restricted to using a location in school, and so we just had to pick somewhere that was quite quiet, and with gloomy lighting.
2. We had to put a lot more effort into finding a location for our film opening as we wanted the setting to convey the idea of new beginnings - after going on a location reccie, we chose to film our opening at the top of Primrose Hill at sunrise. 

The storyboarding process was similar for both out prelim and film opening task - the only difference was that our prelim was around 1 minute shorter than our film opening, and so we needed less shots.

• During the process, we had to make sure we drew a variety of shot types, but also didn't break the shot distance rule.
• When doing our prelim, we used different coloured post-it notes for different shot distances - as it was successful, we also used this technique for our film opening.

PRODUCTION

• When doing our prelim, we spent a lot of time working out set-ups and shot logs for the sequence. 
• We also did this for our opening sequence, but we also had to make a shoot schedule for ourselves and our actors coming with us on the shoot. 
• After our test shoot, we realised that we had a large range of shots, but we didn't have enough masters. Therefore, on our real shoot and re-shoot Anna and Sharlene filmed several takes of a master from the front and one from the back.

POST-PRODUCTION

The Grading Process

• In doing our prelim, we learnt how to do continuity editing and shot reverse shot, and to not break the 180 degree rule. The 180 degree rule wasn't so much of a problem at the start of our sequence as we only had one character, but during the conversation section, we had to pay a lot of attention to it, and we also did a few shot reverse shots.
• We included matches on action in both, but I think our matches on action were smoother in our film opening, due to the fact that we were able to practice them in our prelim. 
• One thing we didn't do with our prelim task was grading - this meant that grading our film opening was a little difficult as we had less practice. 

WORKING AS A TEAM

Fortunately, for both my preliminary and film opening tasks, I was in a group of 3. Our preliminary group worked really well together, despite not having huge amounts of time to plan and complete our prelim task. We had really good group dynamics in our film opening group, for example, if one of us didn't like something, we'd tell our group members, and we'd try to work out a way to alter the idea or compromise so that we all agreed with it. Because there were only 3 of us, it was also quite easy to share the jobs between us; sometimes we had to do the slightly less exciting, time consuming jobs, whereas other times we were given the opportunity to do the better tasks. We created a Facebook group so that we could stay in contact easily, and post ideas that the others could comment on - it was through this Facebook group that we first started developing our narrative. 

 Here is the final cut of our film opening:

Hopefully from watching our final cuts you can see the progression in our filming, editing and organisational skills from our preliminary task to our AS film opening task.