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

In the preliminary task we had to film a quick match-on-action task, focusing on not breaking the 180 degree line. In this task we had to come up with a quick script, format it like an actual movie script in CeltX (a program I hadn't ever encountered before this) and then get into our filming groups to choose the best script to use as the basis. For example, this is the script that I initially wrote however Brandon's was more suited and so we used his script in our preliminary task. CeltX was tricky to use as you have to change the type of formatting for each new line that you do but the final result of using CeltX looks very professional and far better than making a script on something like Microsoft Word.

               Match on Action

For the filming we learnt how to use a basic filming technique called 'Match on Action'. A match on action shot is where the footage is edited so that one shot cuts to another matching the first shot's action and is generally used to cut out unnecessary time as in this case, it would look boring if I were to just walk away from the camera and through the door - the close up shot of the door looks far more interesting.  We had to try a few takes for this as people would walk down the corridor at the same time or the other various distractions such as noise. Doing this shot was useful as we then knew how to use it if we wanted to implement this editing style into our final film.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

        180 Degree Rule

         The 180 degree rule is an invisible line that no character should cross as this would disturb continuity as the rule states that two characters should maintain the same left / right relationship with one another. If not, it would look as though the characters had switched seats so it's incredibly important not to break it unless it's to infer that something is off with the characters / 

world and so is only used in eerie situations such as horror. This was a new rule that I'd learnt as I'd never come across it beforehand. In addition to this 180 degree rule we used a type of shot called 'shot-reverse-shot' which basically means that the shot is reversed to the character with the speaking role. I'd already used this technique in my GCSE film so it wasn't new although it was incredibly useful as we ended up using shot-reverse-shot in our final film and altered things slightly by zooming into the characters face as speaking because more tense.

Additional features

We played around with sound effects and found an appropriate 'bang' sound to indicate Brandon shooting a gun at me as I dramatically fall to the ground. This was a new technique and showed us how sound effects can be used to paint more realistic scenes through the usage of simple diegetic audio sounds. 

I think that all in all, this preliminary task was incredibly useful in helping us learnt how to do basic editing and filming!