Preliminary Task: Evaluation

What did you learn from the experience of filming the footage required for your preliminary task? What went well and what could have ben done better?

I have learnt that when filming, you should get your pre-production right before beginning to film. During the filming, we didn't have our storyboard, so we had to do all the scenes from our heads and some of us disagreed with others. You should also be aware of the time you have on your hands because we began to run out of it and had to film most footage very quickly. Because we rushed, we made a lot of mistakes like members of our group showing up in reflections or round the corners.

In this screenshot we can see part of John's arm round the edge of the doors on the left

We ended up using a room we didn't plan to film in and it was a big mistake. It had bad lighting, and the room was taken with staff that managed to get into a few scenes.

I think that next time when it gets to filming, we'll be using a shot list to have our production much more organised and achieve the results we truly wanted. I have really learnt how vital the production part is. 

What is the difference between pre-production, production and post-production?

Pre-production is where the planning is done before moving on to the production. It can involve things like creating a storyboard (to order the shots, decide on camera angles, camera shots, etc), planning your shot locations, casting your actors for your video, etc.

Production is the filming section, where you use your planning as a guide to achieve the shots you planned for.

Post-production is the progress of using all the media you encountered during the production, like raw footage, and editing together to achieve a video that, when put all together, makes sense to the audience. 

How easy did you find editing in iMovie? Explain at least 4 different skills or techniques that you learnt during this process.

At some points, I found iMovie very easy to use, and at other times I just got frustrated. One of the different skills that I did learn was the ken burn. It's when you have the choice to achieve the effect of zooming in or out, or sliding from left to right, and vice versa. It's a pretty cool feature of iMovie but it has its boundaries of how much you can zoom in, which was the downside. I wished to zoom in much further for the EastEnders part (credits) in the end to really imitate the show but I couldn't go past the limit of zooming closer than iMovie offers. 

Another skill I have learnt is the colour adjustments. iMovie offers changes like the exposure, levels etc. and I think it's a great feature of iMovie if you're not satisfied with the colouring of your raw footage. But we filmed using an iPad and the footage came out pixelated or not HD enough to show high quality changes in the colouring. 

So to overcome the issue of colour adjustments on the raw footage, I chose the 'auto' option, where iMovie makes slight changes to the clips that are slightly visible but don't show the very extreme distortion to the pixels. 

The transitions were great techniques to improve my editing because iMovie offers a good variety of different ways to change from one scene to another. But I wish to have more options at editing the transitions themselves, say the 'dissolve' transition; I'd like for it to not just fade from one clip to another but have the clips also dissolve in a subtractive way for more effect. But I guess it was best to keep this movie simple and not overload it with effects because it's more of a cinematic kind rather than artistic.

I also gained some skills at working with the text. You get the option of choosing the types of text from the range of readily-made text templates that iMovie has. I think you can do very little with the text, just change the font, colour, and the alignment of it. I think it would improve my experience with iMovie if you were able to edit more with the text, say you'd like the text to slide in but also blur, and you can't combine both texts together. But iMovie is a basic editing program and is kept simple, and I believe I have set my expectations pretty high for a software offering this little.

What is continuity editing?

Continuity editing is where all scenes flow smoothly and the order of the shooting makes sense. For example; 

At first, we have the character sitting at a mid-shot, ready for her dialogue..

..afterwards she's talking to the character where we can see over the shoulder that she's still in the same position, so she hasn't moved between the filming and the audience can't tell that the scenes were cut to match and make sense.

What do the following terms mean; a) match on action, and b) shot / reverse shot

a) Match on action is a technique used when editing for continuity editing. It is when one shot cuts to the next, representing the action in the first shot. This creates continuity because the action being carried on from one shot to another draws the viewers away from the fact that the raw footage was cut at certain areas to be put together to make sense. 

b) Shot reverse shot also links to the continuity editing, where conversations between characters looking at each other is used. The camera is looking over the shoulder of one character and looking at the other opposite. It then switches to the character opposite and is looking over their shoulder, focusing on the character the camera was previously looking over shoulder. This often includes the 180 degree rule, where the continuity is retained by not distorting the sense of location of the characters in the shots. 

Analyse your preliminary task as a piece of continuity editing. What are its strengths and what are its weaknesses.

I had to crop a few footage to avoid mistakes but I ended up with bad quality footage. One of these mistakes was that the doors (on the right) were opened when the character was approaching them, and on the next scene they were closed. This means it doesn't make any sense for the audience, leaving them confused.

Door on the far right opened..

..then in the following shot, the door appears to be closed.

I think our clips were very long and I didn't want to have the audience watch the character walk for 10 seconds. I managed to speed up the clips slightly, but I had to trim them to make them shorter. I made sure the scenes were edited in the correct sequence but it didn't achieve the match-on action that I was aiming for.

Another issue was the shaky videoing. Because we were filming using iPads by hand, we couldn't get our shots steady, especially when we had to achieve different camera angles. I managed to overcome this problem by editing the clips to smoothen the stability of the shots. This caused a few clips to be magnified by few percentage to reduce the amount of optimisation iMovie had to make. With this, my clips became poorer quality and if I was to zoom out, the clip could become a bit twitchy. I believe it's because iMovie can't stabilise the clip fully, perhaps the clip being heavy with movement. 

I think the music went well because it's all cheery and I think the way the character moved matched the mood of the song. I also edited the clips to the beat of the song, so the scenes changed on that certain beat. But I'm not satisfied with the way I faded out the song before the tension. I think to improve this issue, I would've added like a broken record before the sound effect I added for the tension when Dr. Interrupt (Emily) turns around to face her patient (Jerin).

Other sound effects I used was the bling for when Jerin smiles. I froze that certain frame of the clip because her smile was actually not part of our storyboard and it went onto behind the scenes and I couldn't include that in the production. I zoomed in using the ken burns effect for her smile and to go with that, I added a fade to white transition between the clip and the frozen frame to indicate the flicker of her teeth and enhance the bling sound effect.

I decided to add a transition at the beginning to introduce the first scene in a fun way. The transition unfolds the 3 divided parts one after another. I thought this would match the text I added. It has half of  it move from left to centre, and the other half from right to centre, eventually joining and creating the title. I thought using 2 different colours (white and red) for the text would give it a more of an interesting welcome to the audience. I think it also makes the text stand out more than just plain white because the establishment shot has pale colours.