Prelim Evaluation

Planning

The planning stage was mostly a success. The group managed to complete a full storyboard, incorporating all of the requirements of the task as quickly as possible. There was some healthy debate between us, and we collaborated very well as a group. However, we crafted the storyboard without having decided upon a location, which meant that some shots on the storyboard would have to be changed, which ate into production time.

Filming

Shooting went quite well. The location was organised very quickly and the actors were all prepared. However, because of some of the changes to the shot list to facilitate the location’s layout, camera angles we had already shot all of our footage for would have to be set up again to capture the new plan. This made the shoot a little bit less efficient.

Editing

The group worked together really well on the edit, reviewing the footage quickly, before deciding what we should use. This meant that the cutting of the prelim film went mostly without a hitch. The only real issue was the shot lengths often having to be cut down in order to cut out unwanted background noises from shooting, which hurts the pace in some places.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The making of the prelim film for my group was quite successful. Aside from the fact that we followed every single one the instructions of the task, following the 180-degree rule, we also worked well, and quickly made decisions. We all had a clear idea of what the prelim film should look like, which made the whole process work so much smoother. This helped when our self-inflicted issues came back to hurt us - for example, the storyboarding of the prelim without having actually seen the location we were going to shoot in. This snowballed as we then had to make changes as we shot, which made it less efficient, which meant that more mistakes were made that forced us to narrow our edit. In retrospect, the biggest changes I would make would be:

1. Creating a storyboard after having seen the location.
2. Writing the shot list separate from the storyboard, so that the information would be a lot less cluttered and changes would be easier to note down.

Personally speaking, I think that my strongest elements of the process were filming and editing, where I got to really get stuck in and put ideas into practice, using the visuals in front of me. The storyboarding was much more difficult for me as I am not the best at drawing, so visualising other people’s ideas could be a struggle at points (until somebody drew it).