Question 7-Look back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt from it in the progression to the full task?

At first I didn’t think that my filming was too bad before my full task however when looking back at previous footage I had filmed for my preliminary task I realized that I’ve improved a lot. I’ve learnt about shot lengths/types, camera angle and in particular framing. I think the framing has improved significantly from the preliminary to full task as in the full task I was far more conscious of how the people looked and were positioned on the camera and making sure that it looked right.

In this screen shot from our preliminary task we can see that the bottom of the persons feet are cut out and it would have looked better if we had framed it differently to make them more central in the shot.  Where as in the shot below from our main task we can see that the hand is framed centrally in the shot.

I’ve also made progress concerning Final Cut Pro. This is as in my final task I’ve had to do more complicated editing involving changing the contrast and brightness as well as cutting it more accurately to make it flow better.

I think that added to this my imagination has been stretched and my approach to things has developed and changed drastically from before the preliminary task when I felt that we had do everything properly and literally. I have grown to understand film more and have realised how hard it is to film some things even if, at first glance I’d assumed they would be easy to film (like the horse scene). I also realised that there is no need to film everything literally and that film is all about trickery and suspending the audiences’ disbelief. I had worried that if I didn’t film it properly the audience would be able to tell that it wasn’t but by filming the horse scene and asking for feedback I have realised that this is not the case. The audience couldn’t tell that the actors weren’t actually on the horse and thought it looked realistic. They also thought that it is possibly more effective this way as it is slightly mysterious and feels like something is being hidden from the audience, building suspense.
From learning about suspending the audiences belief it has made me more aware of how things might be filmed in ‘real’ films and has made me question more whether it is what we think it is or just trickery.