Q7- Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? Mimeograph Jade Holt

Prelim Our Prelim was very useful as it allowed us to figure out how to use the camera and how to do basic editing. This meant that when it came around to our actual task, that we didn’t waste any time learning how to use the camera or the edit suite and we saved time. In our prelim we used Match on Action, 180 degree rule and Shot Reverse Shot. Match on Action is when the ‘cut’ is made on an action (eg. The hero jumps from the window; the next shot, taken from the bottom shows him landing on the ground). This means that because the viewer’s eye is absorbed by the action, it is unlikely you will notice the cut itself. With the 180 degree rule, the camera stays behind an invisible line so that characters & objects on the left stay on the left and those on the right stay on the right. For example: in Sexy Beast, a conversation between Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley, each time one of them speaks it is filmed over the shoulder of the other person, sticking to one side on each person. Shot Reverse Shot is when one character is shown looking at another and then the other charcater is shown looking at the first. This technique allows the viewer to assume that they are looking at each other. These techniques allowed us to practice the continuity processes that we would use in our opening title sequence.

Example of Match on Action This is an image of an actor walking up to a door in one shot, and then the next shot is the opening of the door. These shots next to each other allow the audience to assume that it is one continuous action rather than two separate shots. Example of Shot Reverse Shot & Example of 180 Degree Rule These images show both Shot Reverse Shot and Match on Action as in the first one, Frankie is looking up at something and in the next, we see me standing in front of her from the shot that was taken over Frankie’s shoulder. This allows the audience to assume that Frankie was looking at me in the first shot even though you cannot see me.

Planning It was important to plan our OTS as this meant we didn’t need to waste time with the equipment trying to decide what shots we needed and what we wanted our opening titles to be, and this is why we storyboarded what we hoped our opening titles would look like and what shots we wanted to get. I did a Shooting Schedule, as this was useful to know where we all needed to be and what shots we needed to get in each location. We didn’t use Match on Action, 180 Degree Rule or Shot Reverse Shot in our Opening Titles as we felt they weren’t necessary to our OTS as we only had one character and she doesn’t speak at all. Our pitch was useful as it allowed us to get feedback on our initial ideas and this meant we could edit and adapt any ideas that we thought would work initially but after feedback we found that they wouldn’t. We found that we had to reshoot after our initial filming process as some of the footage we had was irrelevant to the story and this meant we had to get some more footage of Frankie at her day job (Forensic Photographer).

Logging and Rough Cut Our logging process allowed us to colour-code all our footage. This made the process of adding footage to out OTS a lot faster as we didn’t then have to sieve through all our shots which could have taken a lot of time. We used a traffic light system in that we had Red for footage that was bad, Amber for reasonable footage and green for good footage. However we did end up using the red and amber footage as once we added in effects over the top, the shots looked quirky and interesting. We didn’t upload a Rough Cut as we carried on straight through to a final cut. However we did get it looked over before we continued and this allowed us to make changes straight away.

Final Cut Our final OTS was successful as we managed to produce an opening title sequence full of effects that made people want to watch the whole film. However, when viewing our OTS in Adobe Premier, at the end of the final shot, it faded to black. As a result of this we didn’t add a ‘fade to black’ effect onto the end of our sequence and once we had uploaded our OTS to YouTube, we found that it did not actually fade to black, it stopped on a blurred image of Frankie’s face. If we were re-editing our OTS, we would add a ‘Fade to black’ as this made our OTS look more professional.