Coursework planning : based on your first draft

What did you learn during your preliminary task that you want to avoid/ implement/ develop upon in your actual coursework?

Avoid

As we had the lesson to make our preliminary task, we decided to use two media students with no script and no plan on what was to happen. Only a couple of shots were filmed and our editing knowledge was limited/ no-existent, contributing to it being a poor outcome. Therefore, there are several things we wanted to avoid in our preliminary task. Firstly, we learnt during our preliminary work the importance of sound and non-diagetic sound in the video. We thought that considering music choices from our last task, we want to stay away from well known music because we think that then it doesn't have the best effect possible on our audience as they already know the mood. With this in mind, diabetic sound in our preliminary was also something we didn't think about particularly. We had no script, and as a result, the actors were nervous and improvised the script, meaning the film became almost awkward to film. For our actual coursework, therefore, will either have a script or no dialogue at all, meaning this doesn't happen again. As for the filming, we all wanted to film as many shots and angles as we could so that the situation in the preliminary task wouldn't happen, but we would have lots of film to choose from. However, considering we had no understanding, from the preliminary task to our actual coursework, there has been a lot of learning and developing. For that reason, we don't want to avoid anything more because we thought even though our last practice needed a lot of work, it was more development than things to avoid.

Implement (do again)

There isn't much that we want to implement as we thought everything either needed to be avoided or devloped. However, one thing that we want to implement in our film opening is our willingness to work together, share ideas and experiment to try and learn new things throughout our coursework. We knew from the start that we would work really well together and this whole project has proven how well we can put our heads together to come up with ideas, plans, written pieces or practical projects. I think experimenting and our enthusiasm to take time to try a new shot or re-write our plan is something that I have learnt in our preliminary task that is important and something I want to implement in my actual coursework. Other than that, again, we either want to take what we've learnt and avoid it or develop it, but not implement it.

Develop

I thought that for our preliminary task, we learnt a lot about the basics of making a film opening from creating ideas and planning them to filming and editing. Therefore, it's a perfect basis to build on and develop our skills in our actual coursework. Something specifically we want to improve and develop on, is our editing skills, which we know will be put to the test if we want to produce a film opening anything like we imagine. Another point we discussed during the preliminary task, is to come up with more ideas so that we can have a wider choice of what we can do. Then later, plan our idea to almost every detail so we know what is happening at every point. This is something that could have been better in our preliminary task so I want to develop in our actual coursework so that everything runs smoothly and accordingly. For our preliminary exercise, even though the mise-en-scene conditions told us to cast a child in the opening, and we chose to use two teenagers, I think this was a part of the project that didn't go so well because we had specific ideas in mind that were hard to share and cooperate with them as they didn't understand what we wanted. With this in mind, we still wanted to use that age bracket to cast people in our coursework, but instead make sure that the actor understood our idea, and therefore, someone in our group would be preferable.