Evaluation - Question 7.

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


Looking back to my preliminary task and to what I have now achieved I have learnt a great deal! During the preliminary task we came up with several ideas and each time we felt that we could most certainly achieve them. However it was a completely different matter as it was so much harder than that. We realised that a lot of time and effort was going to go into creating something worth watching and that we would enjoy making. Our preliminary task was not what we wanted it to look like and was an eye opener to what we needed to change when making our final piece. We realised there we a number of things that majorly needed to get sorted out such as editing in the right places, cut in the right places, adding sound in that matched the movement of the characters, being able to perfect our camera shots and also to learn how to handle our time effectively. Blogging was another problem I had, I was not used to using a blog regularly and therefore this showed a great deal in the first few weeks of the course. Altogether in the time of my preliminary task up until now I have learnt how to be able to work on my blog and to space out times to add to my blog whilst having enough time to film and have moved on to show progress in what I have learnt and changed my work ethics so that problems that occurred with the prilimerary task would not happen again. Using the mac and imovie I think my group and I created a reasonably good final piece and as a group we managed to achieve editing very well and I feel that our editing matched what we were aiming for our film. I found using the mac particually easy as i own one myself however when it came to being able to use imovie it was not as har as before as we had practised on the preliminary task however we noticed that there were a great deal more challanges we needed to learn when changing the film to black and white adding music and aslo adding in the credits. As part of the course, group work was also something that we needed to over come. There are many benefits from woking in a group as there are disadvantages and i feel this comes down to group size, commitment from members of the group and the contact shared between you. The benefits we found working in a group of four is that we could each take a role in making the film and put our ideas and thoughts to the group when we all came together. Also being friends helped as it was easier to contact each other if we were not sure on somethig in particular. Also working in a group allows you to get a better understanding of team work and can almost help you for the future needs to be able to work with people even if you do not always get along. However even though there are benfits i personally found a great deal of disadvantages. For example being friends means that there is a great deal of time when you are just talking or messing around this did show at the begining of film making as we were so unsure as to how we were going to go about the whole project. Another issue was commitment some people in the group came to a point when the could not be bothered to work or had other things going on so there was a point where a lack of energy between people were shown. Also coming up with ideas meant that if people do not agree you have to come up with a compramise and sometimes thats not always the easiest thing to do as there are so many different personalities and oppinions so change can effect the task altogether as it may not always work. Their were occassionally points where i felt that i could have created the film by myself as i would have been able to concentrate a great deal more however i think without the constant flow of ideas i would be in a situation where i am not sure how to go about things. Using a blog also brought the group together as none of us were sure about how to use them so we could help each other out in that respect and also listen to what others are planning on doing. I also feel that since the preliminary task i have gained a better knowledge of media termonlogy since making the film and also being able to research and use various ideas from outsiders to help contribute to the knowledge and also the confidence in knowing what you are doing whilst filming.