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

From watching the preliminary task after finishing our own coming of age opening sequence  I feel I have learnt a lot more about producing a more professional looking product and about how much goes into the production.

From completing the sound task and the typography task, I have learnt about how much thought and detail goes into the production and how little things that don't seem like a big part of the product such as the sound and the typography have a huge impact on the finished item and are the key ways in which the mood and atmosphere of the film are portrayed. For example if you were producing a horror film and the music was happy and cheerful, it would contradict the horror genre and confuse the audience. For the sound for 'Frayed Ends' we were planning to use two contrasting pieces of music to represent each of the characters however as the shots kept switching between each of the characters preparing for school, the music would have come out very confusing and rushed. This helped us when we were planning the sound for ' Lonely This Christmas?' as we decided it would have more of an impact if we picked out one piece of sound that created a clear sense of what the atmosphere of the film will be like.

Completing the character and audience profiles helped me decide what the final product should be like, as the audience have to be able to understand the characters to be able to engage with the film. By doing the planning for our target audience:teenagers  and the social representation of them, we were able to create characters the audience would be able to relate to and identify with.

Through doing the storyboard and shot list, we were able to know exactly what shots we were filming on each day. When we were planning for our first idea 'Frayed Ends' we didn't prepare a detailed enough shot list which meant that when it came to filming we weren't sure what shots we were doing in what order which lead to them being of poor quality and were rushed. From this, when it came to creating the shot list for 'Lonely This Christmas?' I put more detail into the shot list. This meant that we knew exactly what props, what actors, what titles were going to be in the shot and the camera angles and if there was going to be any camera movement, therefore ending up with more creative and interesting shots.

We used the things we learnt from filming the shots for the preliminary task to make sure that when we filmed this task it was done as well as possible. One of the things I learnt from the preliminary task was to make sure that I began recording a few seconds before the actors began speaking to make sure that we got all of the speech recorded as in the preliminary footage some of the speech was cut off. Another thing I learnt from filming the preliminary footage was to film each of the shots lots of times from different angles so that if there is something wrong with one piece of footage or isn't as interesting from one angle as another  we still have others to use. We used the tripod for every shot for our own opening sequence as this gave a more professional and finished effect to the footage than when we held the camera for the preliminary material. A technique I found that helped me get a smooth pan was to start the shot before the position where you want the pan to start from, I found this helpful as when I first began to move the tripod it would cause the shot to jolt therefore once I had the footage on IMovie I could edit out the shaky bit at the start so that the shot would be steady and to a higher quality.