As Media Studies: Foundation Portfolio Evaluation Question 8 by Conor

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

For our preliminary task we had to choose a film, that had been created by previous students and basically use the idea and copy they way in which they had filmed it etc. At this point we weren't very experienced with using the camera, as we hadn't done a lot of filming prior to it, like we have now.

We used a lot of basic mid-shots like this one (left)








There are a lot of differences between our preliminary and the production of our film, the main one being the experience we had when doing our production and the lack of it we had for the preliminary task. This meant on the production of our film we used a far wider range of camera shots and angles, kept to the rule of thirds and the 180 degree rule, ensured we had enough light and we learnt, through the development of all these things, how to best capture the action to achieve the desired effect and produce an effective opening to a horror film. I feel that in our final film we used a lot more risky shots which could either add to a good atmosphere or ruin the film, to be honest i feel that we have done both:

We attempted to have a action shot of the door being mysteriously slammed behind our actress as she flooded through it, this in-particular i feel was a success of our film, it added real pace and tensity to our film. Therefore this was a risk worth taking as it could have looked fake and shabby but i feel we made the most of it making it a real stand out point in our film

This shot was supposed to be a main scene in our film but the creation of it brought up several problems. We wanted the writing be be being written as she watched it, however there was no-one actually writing it. We used the star board, hoping to combine the writing with the shot of the empty board to do this but had sizing problems fitting the writing on the board, we then settled for just the writing without it being written which in itself takes away massively from the scene and the film in general. We also have timing problems as for a split second, the writing stays on the screen after the board has gone. Due to a combination of these problems


If we were to do the production again we would ensure that there would be no continuity errors so that we wouldn't have to keep re-filming, when the footage is all correct but unable to be used due to lack of continuity -which was very annoying for us!  Also, if we were to do the production again we would ensure we had completed the storyboards fully and clearly, we feel this would have helped us when filming because we would have known exactly what needed to happen in each shot and how it needed to be filmed etc.