Preliminary Exercise Evaluation 6

6) What have you learnt from completing this task? Looking ahead, how will this learning be significant when completing the rest of your foundation coursework?

From completing this task, I've learnt how incredibly important it is to really plan in detail and walkthrough everything before shooting, with the cameras and people in position, because otherwise you don't know if you'll be able to get the right shots. It was good experience and we got a chance to use a lot of different skills that we either hadn't used for a while, or had never used before, as well as the whole process of planning, shooting, and editing something more detailed and advanced than anything we've done in the past. For example, in the production of this sequence, we learnt how to set up shots properly, e.g. 'Camera ready?', 'Sound ready?', 'Roll camera', and of course 'Action!' and 'Cut!'. This was actually really helpful because it meant everyone knew what was happening and everyone was ready - and if they weren't we waited.
When we were planning we had to think about the locations that would be available to us, and if they would work for our idea - we had to change from one room to another because there were people working in one of them. The room we did use was suited well for our sequence and the situation, so we didn't really have a problem, but I've learnt that locations are really important to check out beforehand, and make sure they will be available.
I also learnt a lot about the order in which shots are filmed - when working with a shooting script it is much more efficient, because it meant we knew exactly what we were going to film, we didn't have to shoot in the order they would be arranged during editing (because it was non-linear), and we didn't forget any of our shots - so it all made sense. So I'm going to make sure we use shooting scripts for our group project, so we know exactly what we're doing and our organisation will be a lot better. In the same way, the storyboard really helped; in the planning stage we could see the way our shots would fit together, and check the continuity - unfortunately we didn't see the problem with the establishing pan shot at this stage, but we avoided any others. We also used it when we were editing; it made it so much easier to cut up our footage and put shots in the right places which would otherwise have been trickier because we were using non-linear editing, so we saved a lot of time that would otherwise have been spent looking through all the shots and working out where they'd go.
I learnt that it's also really important to do at least two takes (but preferably more, time permitting) for every shot, even if it looked ok at the time, and to leave more space at the beginnings and ends of shots and dialogue, particularly with shot/reverse-shots, because otherwise it's hard not to cut things off or be really sudden, making the editing more noticeable. Because we haven't got a time limit in the days we film (to an extent) for our group project, we can take the time to do this.
This task has taught me that even simple things take a lot of effort and detail to plan, shoot, and edit, but can still look effective - including dialogue made the sequence interesting, so this is something I'll try to have when it comes to making our film opening. Also, because it was a real-time sequence, we got to show off continuity techniques, so it will be a lot better to do this in our opening.