Evaluation: Question 7

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

The preliminary tasks I was part of were conducted in different groups to my coursework partner, and included one short personal practice and a feature called “The Package”. The basic premise of the former was to exhibit three key filming techniques (shot-reverse shot, match on action and the 180° rule). The latter had to incorporate a plot revolving around a package arriving at our school. Both of these, however, pale in comparison to the final work Adam and I completed, considering the level of familiarity we had to achieve in our use of software such as Final Cut Pro, Motion, and even Photoshop in order to construct our coursework. We also had to learn the skills needed to physically create the various components (the footage itself, the music, the ident) from scratch, having never done any filming even remotely close to this scale before. Like the editing process this, too, involved familiarisation with a lot of new technology and the gaining of hands-on experience.





One skill which is unique to the Media course and which was in no way touched upon in the first few tasks was the research and planning aspect of film development. It was lucky that, for this part, most of the work was either construction of surveys, research, Photoshop editing or storyboard drawing, as all this wasn't particularly new ground to me. However, the depth of detail we were expected to achieve in our preparations was certainly daunting, especially at first. Whereas my preparation for "The Package" and the preliminary task consisted of a few hastily doodled frames and a mental plan of dialogue (supplemented with a good dose of improvisation), nothing was left to chance in our coursework. The storyboards alone took several hours to draft, and several weeks to actually complete in enough detail for me to be happy with them (which, in the end, was actually very useful in terms of bolstering my drawing practice). Researching sound and music techniques used to increase suspense in film was a part that I found particularly interesting, because it made me realise just how many layers of diegetic and non-diegetic sound it took to create the right atmosphere in a scene; something I feel is too often underestimated in film production. This research certainly paid off; the soundtrack and ambient sound of our work ended up being, in my opinion, one of its strongest points. Compiling costumes for the characters via drawing inspiration from real designs was another educational experience for me in terms of picking out the correct visual cues to communicate the right message to our viewers about our characters' personalities and social status. The more general research into the technical side of the industry (such as on idents and graphics) was definitely the area I knew the least about at first, but by the time we had to make our own decisions on these things I was well-informed enough to understand that even something as seemingly trivial as a marginally different font could have a huge impact on the overall feel of the film (a fact we acted on by spending around 20 mins agonisingly choosing between 3 fonts which looked almost identical when making our title sequence). The audience research parts both at the beginning and at the end of our final piece were probably the greatest challenge for me in terms of having to pester people to pay attention to our work, so I'd venture that I should steer clear from a career in media marketing. However, in the end, we gained some fairly solid feedback before and post-production, and it only took barely enough existential dread to fill a bucket. The usefulness of this research was nevertheless unquestionable, from allowing us to narrow down our target audience (an almost 50:50 male to female split within the 15-21 age range) to gleaning information on our audience's enjoyment of the final product (averaging at a score of 4 out of 5 stars).

Another area in which I feel I progressed well was the practical skill of filming itself, especially in terms of handling equipment. The first filming I ever did in "The Package" was abysmal; when I was first entrusted with the camerawork, I accidentally pressed the photo button instead of record several times, costing us a whole scene. The first pans and zooms I ever did, too (shown in the second scene of the first video) were incomplete and very unsteady. Additionally, we didn't even know how to fix the focus on the camera; it should have been set to auto-focus, but wasn't, and so some of our scenes were shot through a haze. There are, of course, innumerable other mistakes in our technique here (such as the fact that, in some scenes, we clearly knocked the camera during filming, making the image waver), but these only bring out the differences compared to the final product even more. Through intensive practice, I gained a significantly steadier hand in terms of both panning and zooming, and, as my confidence rose, so did the quality of the footage. In the solo preliminary study, I also encountered the more basic problem of not being able to find a tripod in time, meaning the shots were noticeably hand-held and highly unprofessional. Again, this taught me the valuable lesson of securing and checking all equipment before planning any fieldwork. The practicalities of on-set filming in general were brought into fairly obvious relief very quickly during the preliminary tasks; even forgetting the box we used in "The Package" in our classroom was somewhat of a hassle, so of course the prospect of forgetting props or a piece of equipment when filming all around the city was not one I cherished or wished to experience. This way of learning on pre-empted mistakes made sure that, when filming our final product, there was little opportunity for blunders of this kind to set us back (although, like everyone, we didn't manage to avoid mistakes completely, meaning we had problems both with location and with the camera at various points throughout). The ambient sound's interference with the clarity of dialogue in "The Package", especially, was an important pointer for later filming; to the best of our abilities, we tried to either record our coursework dialogue separately or to heighten the volume against the background sound. It's interesting that, before beginning filming "De(i)fied", I saw the sound equipment as fairly fun to play around with but difficult to use practically (due to the short handle on the mikes we had available, for instance). However, towards the end, I was entrusted with recording the soundtrack to our film (a.k.a. its backbone) alone, and managed to do so with fairly little incident. The use of lighting indoors is something I'd argue I didn't entirely get the hang of (one of the lights died down to an orange-tinted glow and rendered the entire learning process somewhat void), and so I would like to do more practice of creating a 3D feel to inside scenes if I ever get the chance to in future. Luckily, this wash;t particularly detrimental to the final piece, as the flat, natural lighting we used for most of our film suited the overreaching sombre mood and indie style of it fairly well. So, it seems that learning to handle the equipment correctly depended greatly not only on patience and practice, but also on assurance in one's own ability to make everything work as it should.

In terms of editing, there was even more to be learned. Not only had I only worked with Apple Macs only a few times before, but both Final Cut Pro and Motion were entirely new pieces of software to me. However, under the instruction of  our teacher and technical assistant, we quickly grasped the basics and were able to apply them to our initial tasks in a rather unskilled, experimental manner. This is evidenced by the sheer over-abundance of audio effects in "The Package" piece, as well as their obvious sub-standard quality in general due to being taken from the programme itself (there was no screaming sound effect, so we used a pitched dinosaur scream instead, for example). The musical choices we made in this piece were also influenced first and foremost by the available soundtracks (although the opening soundtrack was original), so it's no surprise the general ambience was cartoon-like, to say the least. On the other hand, I implemented completely bare-bones editing when cutting together my preliminary task. Some of the shots in both works are also evidently the wrong length (too long, too short, or unneeded altogether). This is clearly contrasted to the fairly tasteful and targeted editing we achieved in our coursework, including the quality of the non-diegetic sound, which we recorded separately and layered (with innumerable volume adjustments and fades) throughout our final piece. The syncing of the expanded breathing at the end of our film was another skill I was surprised by our progress in, considering the fact that the first time we ever tried to sync anything it turned out comically bad (whereas here the audio and video timings look almost authentic). The fact that Adam and I even gained enough confidence to alter the colour pallet of our work as we planned is indicative of how much we progressed; when completing the preliminary tasks, I wan't aware of that particular editing window even existing, let alone understanding the nuances of changing colour as opposed to saturation, for instance. The closeness of the cuts and the transitions (or lack thereof) of our final cut compared to the preliminary task alone did wonders in making our narrative flow smoother. The addition of graphics was almost certainly the most frustrating thing about the editing (or, indeed, the whole process); simply lining up the titles correctly in each shot and making sure they moved in a straight line took considerably more patience than I anticipated. The complexity of Motion is truly incomparable with the basic titles I'd used in "The Package" that had been part of the Final Cut Pro package. However, as with everything else, towards the end of our work we were fairly confident in the programme's implementation due to making every conceivable mistake associated with that software, and therefore finally finding a way to utilise it effectively, if still a little time-inefficiently.



In conclusion, the amount of things I learned from the practice and preliminary task to the final piece is immeasurable. Not only did I gain confidence in my ability to handle technology and software (especially cameras and editing programmes, of course), I gained a more sensitive practical and aesthetic understanding of the process, industry and art of filming itself. Additionally, the fact that we had a chance to independently find out about audience research and marketing, picking location and planning filming times, creating idents, costumes, graphics, scripts and storyboards put the entire process into the ever-useful real-world context many courses so sorely lack. The most important thing I learned, however, was the range of skills needed in film-making; the physical practice we got filming, directing and editing our work, was, on balance, the most vital, useful part of the entire experience.

DY