Evaluation feedback

Your evaluation is thorough and discusses relevant areas in depth including discussion of skills developed. You demonstrate an excellent understanding of issues and debates around key concepts and de-construct your own product effectively showing an excellent understanding of codes and conventions of your chosen genre.

16/20

Targets

To access the highest grades you need to present these answers creatively using digital technology such as the voice recorder or the green screen to produce a director's commentary. 

Final feedback

Charlie this is looking impressive and should allow you to gain a B in the coursework.  You now need to check to ensure that research and planning is thorough and organise your web-log so that it is ready to be marked. Ensure that all questions are answered fully.

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

My media product has allowed me to learn a range of new abilities and techniques throughout the course and this essay will go into what those new abilities are and how I developed them.

Firstly, when I started the course we were dropped into the deep end and were told to film a Preliminary task. This allowed me to gather an understanding about camera shot types. Through this I learned about shots such as the close up, extreme close up, over the shoulder, wide shot, long shot, EST shot, mid shot and the shot-reverse-shot (reverse shot). The preliminary task allowed me to experiment with theses shots which would later help me when creating my final product. Another thing my Preliminary task taught me was a very brief attempt at editing. Once we finished filming we began to edit our production using Adobe Premier Elements. This was the first time I used this software and acted as a helpful introduction to editing. Without this I would of been much further behind once I started to edit my film noir.

Secondly, I learned how to properly storyboard my project whilst planning my final project. During the planning stages of my production I story-boarded my film and tried to ensure that Is stuck to it whilst filming. Because I knew I would use it a s a constant reference whilst filming I wanted to give it enough detail that anyone could use the camera and film the scene as I knew I wouldn't always be behind the camera. One limitation of this however is the poor detail in the drawings. As drawing is not my strongest attribute I feel that the quality of the drawn images in the storyboard were not sufficient. It took 4 tries before finally creating a storyboard I was happy with. However, despite this story boarding proved to be an extremely useful tool in my media product and also future products outside of media.

Another key skill I developed through use of media skills was the ability to produce a professional looking script. This skill was developed through constant rewrites of my final production and looking at other official scripts such as Ben Affleck's The Town. When writing the scripts I learned about stage notes, similar to that of theatre and also about the Interior/Exterior of scenes and why it's important to note this down. I developed these skills and put them into use whilst planning my film noir as well as any other outside projects. Because of these techniques I was able to produce a script that gave the other people in my group a better understanding of what I wanted to produce, then as a group we worked on improvements to produce the script we used.

Time structure and organisation were big parts in the planning and production of my film. Personally I feel that this course has motivated me to be more organised towards my projects. I've learned that organisation is key to a product you're happy with, and that you must always plan ahead. An example of this is when we had to do re-shoots for our production so late into the course. we had to make time we didn't have to do this, but once we sat down and organised what we could we produced the final product we have now. However this being said we still had our weaknesses concerning this. For example, the voice over recording took 6 hours to do properly as our efforts constantly kept failing or I didn't feel that the quality was good enough. It was only supposed to take 1 hour, this shows that it was wrong for us to go to the recording studio without any prior knowledge or research and that in future we need to plan for something like this. All in all I felt that organisation was our biggest strength, however the recording studio and the idea to learn about things prior to using them was our biggest weakness.

Continuity editing is an essential skill you need when producing a film. Without continuity the story doesn't flow, the audience gets confused and it comes out as a messy product. The preliminary task was the first instance of us learning about this. We learned about the 180 degrees rule where you cannot change the position of the camera further than 180 degrees otherwise the shot will not have continuity and will confuse the audience. Storyboarding helped expand this skill because when you're storyboarding you imagine how your film is going to play out and you have a certain way you want things to go. So when I was storyboarding I was trying to make sure that every shot followed cohesively and in an aesthetically pleasing way. I feel like the first scene of our noir is a great example of this, where the camera follows his movement and doesn't look too stop motion/start-and-stop and flows well. Like in the scene where he walks from his room into the bathroom and the shot changes from outside the door to inside as he closes it. It's a relatively small detail but I feel that it works well. A weakness of this is the later scenes, I found that the scenes involving Lisa and Uncle Maroni were a lot more stop motion/start-and-stop esque and felt more choppy, I feel like this was again due to lack of organisation and them being re-shoots.

Genre conventions were something I had completely unheard of before the course, now that it's over I'm always intrigued about each genres common conventions and their institutions. We learned about this fairly early on in the course where we produced small essays for film openings such as David Lynch's Blue Velvet, John Woo's Mission Impossible and David Finchers Se7en. These taught us all about the different conventions for each genre and how we could use them for our product. The film I focused mostly on was Se7ven, as David Fincher is one of my favourite modern directors and I felt that his tone in his neo-noir would fit perfectly for the ideas I had in mind when producing the script.

Film institutions were also something I had a very basic knowledge of prior to the course. Through the research I did for this course I learned all about different institutions that produced different films when they were popular. I already had a basic understanding of Spaghetti Westerns but I never knew how many were produced and that I had only seen Sergio Leones tirlogy, there is so much out there that I never knew about. I found that they were so widely produced due to their popularity and their ability to make money. There was only really seven sub genres for Westerns:

• The Union Pacific Story
• The Ranch Soy
• The Empire Story
• The Revenge Story
• The Cavalry Story
• The Outlaw Story
• The Marshall Story

The reason there were only these key story types were because the institutions that produced these films knew what the audience wanted to they could put a western on to show what they expect. There was very little serious creativity or originality. The same story is with Warner Bros. and their film noir, they produced several similar films because they wanted audiences to know what to expect, so they wouldn't be disappointed. This knowledge gave me a  better understanding about film and cinema and made us want to produce something that challenged these conventions. However in the final version of our product I feel that we didn't succeed to greatly on this task. We challenged some minor conventions such as the location and back story but apart from that there wasn't anything completely obvious that challenge these conventions.

Overall I feel that I have learned a great deal of knowledge from this course. Knowledge that I hope to put to further use in my own projects. From the preliminary task to this evaluation
I feel that this course has taught me a lot about piecing a project together and using teamwork to help create the best outcome you want. As stated above the course has also helped teach me a decent understanding of Mac computers, Adobe After Effects and Premier Elements, Recording Studios and the handy cams provided.

I hope you have enjoyed viewing my journey as much as I have taking it.