Evaluation Question 1 Final from Josie Quigley-Jay

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5. How did you attract/ address your audience?

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

 
I felt that there's a massive difference between our Preliminary task and our thriller. This is largely due to the huge learning curve we've experienced the last few months since beginning the thriller task. Overall I believe our thriller looks a lot more professional which is due to the fact that we knew how to use all the equipment and software.
To begin with when filming the preliminary task I used my camera (The same one I used for the thriller) however I'd only ever used it for photography before and so I didn't know how to adjust the settings to suit the affect we wanted or, a bigger issue, how to focus the camera which caused a lot of time wasting, However since then with some practice and a few youtube videos I learnt how to create a variety of different effects just through the camera use alone.
The main software that my skills have improved on is Premiere pro. For editing of the preliminary task quite a bit of the editing was left to Ben with me sat next to him watching as I didn't particularly know what to do. I did learn the basics of how to cut and form a clip but when it came to continuity, filters, titles etc. I was completely useless. During the thriller task on the other hand I improved my skills massively, my joined together clips no longer jump and instead run smooth, I can add basic filters (nothing to fancy but it's enough) I can add titles and adjust how they enter, exit how long they stay AND I can even cut up music and rearrange it so it suits the scene better. I feel a lot more confident with Premiere pro than I did a few months ago and a lot of it is down to either Ben showing me or ditching me until I worked it out. Most of the time I could work it out. Although we did have one editing hiccup in which I accidentally somehow managed to lose the entire project on Premiere pro and because of this we had to call in our year 14 friend Sam who saved the day. I'm still not sure how but I'm very thankful to him.
One of the unsuccessful software we attempted to use was After Effects in order to add a glitch effect to the beginning ERROR message. This part was down to Ben as I was completely out of my depth. It went well as Ben managed to add the effect however we had no idea how to put it back into Premiere pro which we needed to do in order to make other adjustments. We couldn't find any youtube videos to help us or any friends that knew what they were doing and so we had to abandon the idea. Although we failed with after effects this time (Mainly our fault though, I won't blame the software) I would very much like to learn how to use it properly for next year at A2.

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

1. What have you learnt during the making of your Preliminary Task?

I've learnt the basics of how to edit videos using premier pro however I still need quite a bit of practice as, it is VERY basic knowledge. I still cannot add in special effects but match on action? I'm not too shabby even if I do say so myself.

Although we managed our time well I've learnt to at least leave a week minimum to edit all the videos together but two weeks would be better. It's also helpful to upload and sort through videos as you film them and not leave it all till editing. Doing this means you can easily see if the shots you've taken can be used or if they need to be redone. Do a day of filming, upload them all that night, sort them into useful and delete worthy.

With group work I learnt it should be fun cause otherwise you never want to get anything done however fun and actually doing the work should be well balance or you'll never meet the deadline. We did manage to balance this and got our task done in time without arguments or boredom.

Our storyboard was not the most extravagant but it worked. It showed us exactly the shots we needed to take and proved its usefulness. However we have learnt to always keep it with you when shooting. When it came to editing I realised we had strayed slightly from the original planned shots as we did not have it with us at the time, instead we looked at it, picked out some shots to do before hand, did some and improvised some to fit our wanted storyline. From this I've also learnt to make sure you're completely happy with the storyboard and know exactly how it fits together before you start shooting.

I believe that we meet the brief pretty well in the time we had. We successfully managed to incorporate shot/reverse shot into our video in the segment of speech in order to show which character was talking. To fit with this we did not break the 180 degree rule which involves the characters having the same right/left. it helped make the characters conversation look more believable as to positioning.

Our Match on Action worked very well when especially in the beginning of our task when Gemma was walking down to corridor and through the door. All of the clips aligned helping to display good continuity.