Evaluation question 7

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

The large thing for me was the variety of shots. Although the objective of the prelim was to experiment with the camera in order to develop skills, I felt that we did have a wide range of shots from the start but there are still far more shots that we used in Safeguard (final product)

The shot above had a really bad problem with the sound, because some of the sound picked up is through the camera, it added a strange effect to the sound. This would never happen in our final product because my director (Yuksel) was far too fussy and also because we used pre-recorded foley sounds and music to create a sound-scape in comparison with this fairly basic one.

Most of our camera shots in this prelim we also not well thought out, this one is an exception where we used a low angle to show that some dodgy business was going on. But again this is nothing in comparison with our  final product which used very effective angles to show how the character currently felt and status changing, where at the begin he had a high angle at the flashback to show how small he felt and at the end of the film the camera was at a low angle to show how triumphant his rise was.

This picture was a section of really bad editing. The section flips really quickly between me holding the ID card, putting it away, putting it away again then my arms being suddenly crossed. This can be compared to the fast and snappy flash back scenes in Safeguard that really took advantage of editing to tell the audience quickly, what was happening and most of all, had no editing mistakes.

One feature that stood out from our prelim and remained consistent was the framing, the framing, even in our prelim was very good and obeyed rules like the rule of thirds and 180 degree rule. The 180 degree rule is a rule of thumb in media where the camera does not go past what it is focusing on and does not cross this imaginary point across the character. However in Safeguard this rule is frequently broken during the boxing scene. This is because the sport is fast paced and the characters are clearly identifiable. The thirds rule is simply using thirds of the screen as main focal points. Our skills have allowed us to be comfortable with these rules and know when they are not needed.

A final comparison point is that our location here is a bit lame. Really? Only filming in college. The boring location really removed any hope of interesting Mise en Scene completely and was replaced with quite mediocre settings. one big thing was that we could not control the lighting at all in our footage and it meant that basically our prelim looked mundane and uninteresting.  

overall I feel that my skills have greatly improved. There has been a vast improvement in framing , editing and sound largely. The difference between the prelim and Safeguard is huge and it has been a really steep learning curve for me. Everything in the final product feels a lot smoother and transitions better even though it jumps between locations. Also there is a lot more experimenting in this one. If you noticed from our Behind the scenes vlogs there have been a lot of finishing the shot list and then experimenting below is one of our most experimental shots and it really paid off. I think that our final product had a lot more freedom to do shots like this which was the main cause of improvement as well as the skill development.