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

Throughout the making of the film (which has been pretty stressful may I add) I think we've made a lot of progress from when we first filmed in our lesson with Michael Schillinger, as now in our actual film, we have edited it, instead of filming and rewriting over the film we had until we got the scene right, as before we did our real prelim task we filmed with a camera that had a tape instead of a camera with an SD card which is a lot easier as all the clips are seperated and you can delete the ones you do not like.

First and second time of filming:
http://www.http://lewisnaomiasmedia.blogspot.com/2011/02/first-and-second-time-round.html/
We learnt how to film from different angles, and that it should not always be filmed from the same height so it would seem more realistic and professional than just looking like it's another homemade video that you would make of family holidays.
Even inbetween making our actual film and the first time we did film our prelim showed that we had in fact improved in some quality.



In our prelim, we learnt how to demonstrate:
Match On Action:

This was the example we watched to explain clearly what Match on Action was.

Shot/Reverse Shot:

This was the example that we watched in class to show a range of editing techniques but mainly demonstrating shot reverse shot.

180 Degree Rule:

This was the example we watched in class, as since it was quite difficult to understand by word of mouth, we watched this clip on youtube and afterwards me and my class were a lot more clued in what the 180 degree rule was.

What we learnt throughout the process of the filming is that expressions are very important in the film. Because depending on the characters expressions could change the view of the film completely, for instance if a character was being murdered and the victim was laughing or even so much smiling, then it would ruin the verisimilitude, and the audience would start to become uninterested whilst watching the film as they won't believe it was real in any way what so ever. Close ups are very important within films, much like expressions (they are linked together), it means the audience could become close and understand the feeling that the character is going through.

Technical Codes and Convetions
Whilst editing, I came across a lot of techniques in order to make the film better.
Chroma Keyer-Chroma key compositing is a technique for compositing two images or frames together in which a color (or a small color range) from one image is removed (made transparent), revealing another image behind it. We used this in our film, when Jenny is looking out of Olivia's window and in which she should be seeing a forest of some sort to make it seem like Olivia lives in a really eerie place, so we had to replace what was originally out in the garden into the forest that is attenborough nature reserve, as this had a lot of relevance to the story in our film.

Pan/Crop- Panning was used so that if needed at some parts we needed to zoom in but have not done it originally with the camera, it means you can slowly pan in and zoom so that it looks like the camera shot was like that originally. Cropping was so that if there was anything that we desperately needed to cdrop out, for instance a person may be in the background that was not meant to be there or a prop that wasn't meant to be there because it totally goes out the context of the film.

Mask- Masking is a process meaning that you can essentially 'cut out' the parts of the scene you want and then put a picture behind that image, then you can do so, however this is very difficult to do and takes a very long time to do in the first place as you have to re-do it all every keyframe (about 0.1 seconds) in order to get it right and show smoothly.

Desaturate- I had to use this quite a bit as in some parts it might be too sunny or too much glare so in order to make it look all the same and not have some scenes too bright and some scenes too dull, I would use the desaturate option to dull the colour a bit.