Evaluating Our Preliminary Task (Taken)

Planning:

When presented with the brief, our group initially struggled to put together a continuous plot that incorporated the points. We watched some of the previous preliminary task videos, and were particularly interested in the idea of a drug deal or other shady exchange. We thought it had good potential for humor, and putting it at table allowed us to fill two of the criteria, a shot of someone sitting down and a dialogue exchange. While no one in our group was particularly good at acting, Xena and Mindi stated they had a small amount of experience. It was decided because of this that they would act in the video, while Hazel and did most of the filming. We would also make sure that Xena and Mindi were in the shot.

The plot of our video is not very detailed, as we had limited time to work on it. This also goes for our storyboard which I had to draft and draw in a very small space of time. We spent most of the hour planning, and then rushed to complete our storyboard. We also only had six panels to fit everything in to.

 We used a teddy bear as the "hostage" in our plot, as it meant we didn't need another actor, added some humour to the situation, and we were able to put a ribbon around its neck to differentiate between the fake bear and the original bear.
For our location we decided to just use any empty classroom.

Filming:

We had an hour to complete the filming. We made it a priority to complete most of the outdoor scenes first so that they could be completed in one session. This is to prevent continuity issues with weather and lighting, and also to avoid the crowds of people that would be in our chosen filming location later in the day. The indoor scenes were filmed in an empty classroom, conveniently next door to our own, and the adjoining corridor.

There was no script, but we had noted roughly what we wanted the characters to say. We mostly improvised or decided on lines a few seconds before filming the shot.

Some of the camera shots were out of focus. Some were shaky due to the tripod mount being very stiff and difficult to move in one smooth motion.

This shot, for example, was not properly focused, making it appear blurry and unprofessional. In future, we should make sure our camera is in focus before filming.

This shot, while not shown in the screencap, was very shaky, detracting from its effect. It would have worked better if we'd adjusted the tripod mount to move more easily.

This was one of the shots that we couldn't fit on the storyboard, but thought the loud noise of Xena grabbing the bag would help increase tension.

Editing:

Whilst I have used video editing software before, none of us were familiar with final cut pro specifically, or how to use macs in general. It was difficult to figure out how to import our videos, and we had some issues with it, but eventually we managed to get everything into Final Cut Pro.

Editing the video down was mostly removing our failed takes of certain shots, and watching carefully and discussing amongst ourselves about where we should cut clips. It was very difficult to do everything within the hour, especially since we'd lost a lot of time trying to import our videos.

In Conclusion:

There were a lot of issues I was not aware we would have until we began filming, such as the focus issues. In future, we will be more careful in our filming.

I would have also have liked to experiment more with speech, such as attempting to do a voice over.