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

In our preliminary exercise, we worked again in 2 groups. We had to write a piece of imaginative writing involving a dialogue, and then doing it for real. Despite my group not doing my idea which was about a parent and the principal, I think we did a good job. We did a mini "film" about 2 friends trying to agree on something. I was behind the camera this time while the other 2 people were acting it out. It was good me being the one in charge of the camera because I was the one who could see it all coming together first, and I learnt a few things about using a video camera, like how to start the videoing of it and how to differ the use of lighting on the video cam while we were inside and outside. For the setting, we just used our classroom and the outside of the building. We did several takes and editing on Imovie, but we didn't use any special effects. There were some rules we had to obey, like the 180 rule where the camera had to stay on the same side as the character and not stray to the opposite side, which we did achieve in the end. At first, we kind of forgot about doing the 180 rule for some of the shots, but we redid the scenes where we didn't apply the rule,



and although it was a pain redoing it all, it was worth it. There was a day when one team member was away so it was harder to shoot as we had to pretend the other person was in a conversation, but we just ended up shooting her by herself, so that when the other person returned, all we had to shoot was of what she had to say. There was a problem with the costumes, because someone wore a different outfit than she was wearing the previous day of filming, so we decided to do loads of close ups of just their faces rather than showing off their whole body. This worked because at this point, they were sitting down at a table so not seeing their entire body wasn't as important as if they were standing. As far as angles are concerned, we did quite a lot of shoulder shots (obeying the 180 rule) and some close ups, we also did some medium close ups and 1 or 2 long shots.

I have learnt quite a lot of new things, especially involving Imovie. With Imovie I have learnt how to fiddle around with the special effects and that when applying any kind of effect, you have to wait for it to finish applying it to the clip otherwise they get messed up. Also learnt a few things about working behind a camera - first of all how to turn it on and remember to press the record button! And how to work with a camera on a tripod to get the angles right as you have to move it with the handle on the tripod, you cant rely on your hands so can sometimes be a bit difficult to get used to.

With titles, I learnt mainly where to place them differently ie in the middle, bottom right or top left. We decided that the main title, Moving On? should be placed in the very centre and therefore in bigger font so that it would really pop out when viewing it. In our preliminary task, we didn't really use a lot of titles, but as we got to our final task we realised we had to put more of them in like mentioning the cast.

In terms of music, we had none whatsoever in the preliminary task as it was dialogue all the way through, however, with our final film we did decide that there should be some kind of music all the way through and that's what we did. Despite the music being there, the only thing we muted out was the dialogue and we kept the noises to make it sound more realistic.