Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product? 

My practice film

  kayleigh, harriet, dani and kate from KayleighGill on Vimeo.

I sense my technical skills of working with a camcorder have improved massively during this project as I have learnt so much. When I was first given a camcorder in class and asked to create a short film of any genre I was immediately alarmed as I had never done anything of the sort, it was all a little advanced for me. However looking back on the complete project I think I managed to pick up and learn a lot of the skills. Below is my first time of filming when given a camera.

Throughout our film we tried to include as many different camera angles as possible, I had no idea half of these shots existed! The panning shot was easily my preferred shot, panning refers to the rotation in a horizontal scan of a still camcorder. Panning a camera results in a motion similar to that of someone shaking their head from side to side or someone walking up a stairway. I feel using this shot helped create the feeling of motion, nevertheless capturing this angle was exceptionally ambitious as it requires a steady hand and a lot of patience. We also struggled with capturing the angles as we had no idea what it would look like in the completed project, thankfully it has come together pleasantly.

Setting up our surroundings was time consuming, we had it all in our minds yet when creating it we struggled. Doing a test run accompanied this as it gave us an idea of what our set up surroundings looked like on our film and how they tied in with our representation.
Time management and organisation:
I've never really had any skills in management and organisation. Yet I must say whilst doing this project my organisation and management have improved massively, keeping up with my blog and filming at the same time has been a push however I have managed it.

After a couple lessons at school on this project we decided to create a filming and blogging schedule, this encouraged us to keep up with our work once I had complete tasks on my schedule I was satisfied. I had hoped this would help with the stress levels, unfortunately it did not. Out of the two I feel my organisation skills were achieved a lot better than my time keeping management skills yet I also feel I benefited from this and learned a lot.

Team skills:

Functioning successfully as a small team required clear communication on an intellectual level and an emotion level. Open communication where we shared our thoughts, ideas and feelings was crucial as unspoken assumptions and issues could have been destructive towards our project and interrupted our team functioning.

Kayleigh, Beth and I were able to communicate very well allowing: listening,

questioning, persuading, respecting, helping, sharing and participating all to take place well. I think that

we all did really well and we created a strong team bond where we all felt comfortable speaking up, being heard and with the final ideas.

From doing our preliminary task to actually creating our film i feel like we have developed and learnt a lot. For example, we learnt a lot about lighting. When creating our film we had to think carefully about when we were going to film, because at the beginning of our film we filming outside. e.g the gang walking along the path and when the gang meet Jacob. All of these parts of the film were filmed outside, which mean that lighting was incredibly important because we didnt want it to be too dark. We didn't have this problem while making our preliminary task because it was filmed inside so the lights helped create a decent lighting.