Ella's Evaluation - Question Seven

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

Costume and Location
For the preliminary task, we were unorganised. Looking back, we did little preparation, we never discussed in detail our costume and although we quickly decided we wanted to use one of the offices at our college as our location. We went about getting permission and time in space the wrong way and didn't do it soon enough. Therefore when we turned up we had to rush filming as we only had a short time in the space. However for our 'White Collar Complex' opening sequence, we researched and discussed every single detail of hair, makeup, costume, location. We explored each of our ideas to make it the best possible film. We realistic costumes and believable locations.

As we were filming outside of college we needed permission to film in each of our locations, which we went about gaining early on and choosing a suitable date and time to film.  This meant we were organised and had plenty of time to film and re-film as many shots as we needed in the space. Despite this, unfortunately, our location of 'Starbucks' Hayward's Heath let us down on the day. We overcame this by making a little indie cafe inside my house. Thankfully, it looked quite good and was still believable as many little indie coffee shops in London are popular with richer consumer, which was similar to the characters we were creating

Sound
In our preliminary we learnt about Foley sound effects and using sound to increase, with such things as crescendo, drama and tension creating climatic moments, to fit with our thriller genre.
This then gave us the knowledge and experience to go forward and be confident using it in our main task.
Although we didn't put many obvious Foley sound effects, we still spent a lot of time recording sounds and adding them in post production. For example, the subtle background ambient sound of people talking in the cafe or the diegetic synchronous sound of chopping the vegetables. We had to match the sound perfectly with the action of the chop on screen which took a lot of time and was difficult. However using chopping sounds we recorded at the scene  gave us the freedom to use the shots which may look the best from a cinematography point of view despite not have the best sound, as we knew we had quality sound we could add when editing. We also used some more clear non-diegetic sound, to make our sequence more interesting and keep the spectator on the edge of their seat. For example when Natalie is on the phone, there's varied shots jumping and the sound of white noise adding emphasis to Natalie's reaction of shock and giving an atmosphere of panic and fear.
We also used sound to try build enigma for example the off screen sound at the end of our film when Natalie hears the gun shot through a phone, it makes the spectator question what is happening and intrigues them.

Editing
Our preliminary film included barely any editing at all; we used simple basic cuts, there wasn't any colour correction and only a slight slow motion effect was applied. Our sound was also was recorded at the time of the filming and the only editing done was the adding of a parallel comedic soundtrack.

Our 'White Collar Complex' thriller opening was more varied and sophisticated. The process began with us uploading and labelling each individual piece of footage we had captured. This allowed us to easily edit our film without losing clips or having to scroll through everything to find what we wanted. It gave us the leeway to be able to use perhaps even the tiniest snipper of an outtake in order to get the best finished product. 

We again, in our 'White Collar Complex' film, used the slow motion video effect on a scene to help add emphasis of time passing. We took our knowledge from the preliminary to be able to easily use this.  This we combined with other techniques, which we learnt through experimentation such as the fade in fade out transition. In addition to this, in our preliminary we learnt about white balance and its importance. However as we used different cameras, the setup was different and unfortunately as we began editing we observed that we must have done it incorrectly as some shots had a yellowy tone. Luckily this gave us an opportunity to further our editing skills as we colour corrected these shots successfully using Final Cut Pro.

Lighting
When shooting our preliminary task we only used the natural lighting from a window and the one ceiling light in the small room we used as our location. For our main task, we learnt more about the various lighting options and techniques to use them. Therefore when it came to lighting our 'White Collar Complex' film, we knew how to light our set to create subtle naturalistic lighting as well as enabling us to get a clearly lit scene so the spectator can see everything.