Preliminary Project

Self-Evaluation – Oliver Revill

Technical Aspects(1)

As this was only our preliminary, to give us a slight sense of the horrors we had to come, we decided to try as much as we could, attempt to make this as great as possible and be experimental. Most of our attempts failed miserably, but we are sure our legitimate piece will be a lot better due to our confidence in prelim. This was the first time for a lot of us to shoot and edit and act so it was different to say the least.

During our preliminary project we found great fun using the cameras as we was allowed to use a lens to attach to the camera and experiment with a lot of different effects such as; blurring out the background/foreground. This was tricky to do at first as we was unaware of how or what to do, but we swiftly learnt and was on the right track to shoot some pretty nifty shots.

Technical Aspects(2)

Editing was interesting as we managed to find the only computer in the ICT Classroom that shuts down our work for no apparent reason. However I found real enjoyment with the editing, sitting at a desktop and making a piece of art with artificial sound, diegetic, non-diegetic. It was great fun whilst also being an incredible learning experience.

Time management was never an issue for me as I do nothing out of school and the majority of the time, nothing in school. I was free to shoot 99% of the time and was there 100% of the time. However I couldn't do it on my own and Emma stayed back a lot after school to shoot the prelim.  We worked hard with the cameras to create the most pristine shot we possibly could - we even used a trolley from B&Q as a make-shift dolly for the perfect tracking shot.

Technically I think we did exceptionally well as it was the first time we worked on filming with the cameras, we learnt a lot of valuable lessons and techniques to prepare us for the next task.

What Went Well When in production of the film, we borrowed a lens to help with the

shooting of our film, it allowed us to blur certain parts of the shot out, we used this to the best of our advantage to create the perfect ambiance for our film, this was incredible and created some great shots.

Team work was key when in a project, as all 3 of us was from different schools it took time for friendships to grow and for us to be able to laugh and have fun, feeling comfortable with each other enough to actually express ourselves with the camera and not feel shy to not say anything.

We managed to create a stunning piece of film, the final piece looked professional in places and had a certain tone to it.

We managed to edit quite effectively, as our computer kept shutting down and deleting our work we had to develop the skill of working at a quick pace and to a high quality due to the uncertainty of the computer, saying this, we did fail to meet the deadline and was late by a day but in the long-term we acquired a great skill.

We shot some brilliant shots, we should be extremely proud of our piece as it looks beautiful. Using the lens, it looks extremely professional.

Areas of Improvement To improve, we had initially decided to use teachers as actors however

their schedules didn't coincide with each others and found it extremely difficult to locate and secure them at times so we decided to use ourselves for the acting - this removed the believability of the piece as 16 year old students are not assassins (or are they). Overall we decided acting ourselves outweighed the problems of teachers acting caused us.

There was potentially a continuity error technically in our film, as one day we used the lens and the next we didn't. So, the desired effect changes, visually it is obvious that something changes, it was the lens. When shooting our proper piece we will make it a priority to keep it all at a high quality.

Another thing we could have improved on was the duration, I think our film was too short. We needed to increase the length by about one minute.

Whether my view is bias or not I believe that we didn't make many mistakes, as it is our first time I believe we did well.

Even though we managed to incorporate a lot of the brief in, we didn’t manage to involve a shot/reverse shot. We could improve by keeping to the brief a lot more.

Contribution and Teamwork Personally I believe I spent a lot of time and effort in this

project as I shot a lot of the film and edited the majority. I believe me and Emma shared these roles equally.

My contribution to the project was a lot, I acted, edited and worked the camera, I put a lot of my own time within the production of the film, pre-production too. I wrote most of the script and assisted Emma within the storyboards however as she is the greatest artist in our group we elected her to draw them up.

I could have put more effort in and made a greater contribution by creating music to our piece as that is what it lacked, I was determined to do some score to it however we ran out of time and decided that as it was only our preliminary project, as long as we learn for next time.