Evaluation: Question 7

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

Looking back at my preliminary task, and then looking at my finished product, Slaughter School, I feel that my media skills have improved widely. One main improvement is that I have learnt to hold a camera steady and how to use a tripod, allowing me to get a professional shot. Also, during the preliminary task, I didn't really experiment much with the features on the camera, such as the zoom in and zoom out button, which I used a lot in my final production in order to create suspense or to focus in on something. Another big improvement is the variety of shots that I used in Slaughter School. In my preliminary task, I only really used the shots that we were instructed to use in the question, so I didn’t really get to be very creative, but in Slaughter School, I made sure that I used a variety of different shots in order to establish different things, rather than just giving the same, single shot to everything, which wouldn’t really be very interesting. I didn’t use editing a great deal in the preliminary task either – we had to cut the shots so that they would fit together smoothly and we added a title, but we didn’t really add effects or transitions to the shots, unlike in our final production (where there are black and white shots, cross dissolves, etc). The final thing I feel has improved since we did our preliminary task is continuity, as in the preliminary task, we didn’t really pay much attention to this, but in Slaughter School we were constantly checking to make sure that the mise-en-scene was exactly as it was in the last shot, in order to make the film flow, making it look more realistic.