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

From the start of the year to now we have come a long way from our preliminary short over the past few months. Although we managed to film and editing within two lessons for our Prelim, we spent a great deal making sure we had done all the research that was required for us to develop on our ideas on our Opening Sequence. We have definitely come along way since our 30 second Prelim. Our targets were met from our Prelim to our Opening Sequence, we were all quiet on set (this was easily done and controlled well). The other task was acting continuity, which as shown in our video of Dirty Little Secret, there was nothing different in the way the actors talked or acted. Third and finally the last target was experiment more with lighting and camera angles, this will be demonstrated as I progress further into this answer.

Lighting...

The Preliminary task was filming in our tutors office, we used the natural light coming in through the window and had no artificial light on set. No reflectors were used on set either during the filming as we wanted to create a realistic environment so it would seem believable to the audience. The opening sequence of Dirty Little Secret was a lot more complicated than that, as we had to film our entire sequence in the TV Studio and convince the audience that we are not in a college buildings studio. This meant careful planning on what light was appropriate for a Film Noir styled film. We wanted to keep it low key, so playing around with the lights was crucial with creating certain shadows on objects or the actors. Each shot we used 3 different lights, make sure we put them on at an angle at the actors faces so it would highlight key aspects of that persons face. We wanted our opening sequence to look more 'arty' than realistic like our short Prelim. I think we really achieved this and allowed us to be more creative with our lighting and effects.


Camera Angles...

The Preliminary task we stuck to the camera basics which was shot reverse shot (which is a reoccurring theme in our opening sequence as well), Close ups of specific peoples faces and Match on Action shots and the occasional use of panning. We kept it plain and simple to give the aspect of two people talking in an office scenario. We took all our knowledge from the prelim task and recreated them within our interrogation scene, which we used similar shots but added some more challenging shots to compliment the simple shots we decided to put in too break up the scene a little was an Aerial shot of the two detective talking, we did this bad standing on a step ladder and free hand film the scene for a few second. This was really effective and more experimental than previous shots, which helped boost the cinematography overall. We decided to be less shy with close ups and do more extreme close ups of the detectives smoking to pull away from the typical shot reverse shot technique. Another few shots we used were mid/wide shots, to show the audience more of the detectives surroundings and create my black space around certain characters to create the aura of enigma. 


Correcting Noise...
So we had problems during editing because of noise from off the frame was notice-able. We worked around this but was really hard editing around it or changing the noise/voice recordings over. The opening Sequence for Dirty Little Secret was a lot better for us because we didn't have any distraction noises in the background that we had to correct. The only thing we had to do was the sound was drag it too fit around the cuts we made I.E sound from one clip going on to another clip, on purpose not by accident. Then once we made sure the sound and speech was all to our liking, we made sure that some of the quieter parts of speech were made loud so the audience can hear what they are saying and that the voices don't go out of key/loudness.


Continuity...
Every film will have at least one continuity failure in, with our Prelim it was the acting which didn't match and didn't remain consistent. This made it hard to edit around and caused frustration, so when we began filming our opening sequence we made sure to check over and over again just incase we made any continuity mistakes. Other than one mistake which we resolved by clever editing, it was a lot smoother process than the Prelim, and we pushed ourselves not to make any serious mistakes which could make the opening sequence less dramatic and bring the viewer away from what they should be watch. Overall I am quite pleased with our final outcome.

The preliminary activity brought a lot of mistake to the surface, but made us realize what to look out for and make sure we don't make the same mistakes twice. The Opening Sequence allowed us to experiment more with lighting, camera angles...etc. I'm glad we didn't edit or morph the footage of the prelim, because it allowed us to to try out a mixture of different style with our Opening Sequence footage, where we played around with the contrast and brightness to the desaturation and colour tools. I feel me and my group have made great progress in completing our short sequence Dirty Little Secret as we got to explore bigger technologies (Cannon XF 305 Cameras compared to the smaller handheld ones) and got us more involved as a group with decision making.