Evaluation of Preliminary Task

The AS Preliminary task involved a short film clip that included a film with a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she then exchanges a couple of lines with. The names of the people in our group were Dominique, Oyin, Sara and Chauntelle.
Planning and Research
Our preliminary task was to first use other AS preliminaries as examples as to how we were going to base our preliminary task. We used clips from You Tube that featured several examples of AS preliminaries that could help assist us with our task. When we watched these AS preliminary tasks we were evaluating them to see if they included dialogue, match cut, 180 degree rule, shot reverse shot, and the timing of the clip. We also wrote down critiques on each clip to see how they can improve and what they did well. Did this evaluation help you with your own preliminary task? During lesson as a group we thought of ideas on what we should include in our preliminary task. Suggestions included
• Dialogue that was about a character that went to a party
• Match cut of the black part of a Jamaican flag into a black blazer
• A conversation that was in a classroom over a table that took account of the 180 degree rule
We had an idea to show the actors dancing in a room that resembled a party and to use the clips of them dancing to help us with our match on action (as the match cut was switched to a match on action). We then changed this idea to something more basic that included a character walking into a room, opening a door, crossing the room, and exchanging some dialogue.
We also researched into how exactly we were going to use the match cut as an editing technique to make it realistic when we were going to use it in our preliminary task. We also discussed how we were going to set up the 180 degree rule conversation between the two characters so that we would not obstruct the rule. This research was done so that the perspective of where the character was sitting would not change.
Our planning and research was done over the phone at times and during our media lesions. We mindmapped all of our ideas onto paper so we could pick out the best ideas we wanted to include in our filming
Pre-production planning
We created three different storyboards for our preliminary tasks. The first storyboard that we created was a match cut of the black part of the Jamaican flag to a black blazer. This was the first scene then we proceeded for a character to open the door, walk into the class room, share a dialogue using the 180 degree rule, a cut-away to a clock on the wall and the characters leave. We then changed this to a second storyboard where characters were a character had dialogue with a teacher involving the character being allowed to use a vacant room. This then proceeded to the character leaving, and a match on action of the characters dancing from different angles. We then changed this storyboard to our final idea. Our final idea was more basic than the rest. The first scene was of a character walking towards a door, pushing the door open, and crossing the room to sit down a share dialogue with another character. The characters then proceeded to leave the room. We had several meetings formally in class and outside of class discussing changes to the task. Our concerns involved the task being complicated and also concerns as to if the filming would be over one minute this was the reason to why we made the footage more basic.

Production Process
We created a video journal the first day we started filming. In our video journal we noted that we
experienced some difficulty whilst filming. We experienced some difficulty in the filming process as to where we were going to film because we couldn’t find a place to film. We also wanted to project a music video footage from the internet onto a whiteboard so it would be seen when we were filming. We experienced little difficulty just by making sure that the music video was visible whilst we were filming. In addition to that, when we were doing our match on action whilst the character was dancing we wanted to make sure the character was visible so we had some lighting difficulties.
Our final idea for our Preliminary task that we stuck with, we experienced very little difficultly. For instance we filmed that match on action of the character just about to push the door then appearing through the other side two times to try and perfect it. We also practised our dialogue so that we would know what we were going to say before we started filming.
Evaluation
What went well:
 Good ideas from each group member
 Able to meet even after school hours
 We all cooperated with each other
 We managed to finish the task when on the deadline
 Included all of the criteria asked for the preliminary task
Things to improve:
 Be more simplistic when the tasks given our quite basic
 Talk more with teachers about vacant rooms for actual filming
 Remember to include all the criteria asked for the task.