Evaluation of Preliminary Task

We chose to link our preliminary task to our final task as we thought that this would enable our final piece to be to the best of our ability because we would have had practice filming scenes that linked to it  beforehand hand.
It is a 30 second film of the babysitter entering the house. She exchanges a few lines of dialogue with the mother of the baby before the phone starts to ring (foreshadowing events that happen in our final opening).


Filming
Myself, Megan and Hannah went round Megan's on the 28th of October to film our preliminary task, however it didn't go very well.
Whilst we were filming we encountered a few problems. These included our friends who we had asked to act in the film being disruptive and we also found Megan's brother was too. In the background of a lot of the shots you can either hear or see them. Also, when we got back to school and watched the footage through, we realised that the fact we had not used a tripod was obvious. The filming was shaky and did not look professional. 
We then set another date to film for this which was the 22nd of December. This was probably in hind-sight to far away from the other day however this was the next time we were all free and able to get to Megan's. Taking on board the issues we had before and the solutions we came up with to solve them - use a tripod, film when Megan's family were out, act in it ourselves rather then ask our friends - we started to film. This time filming was successful and we managed to get all of the shots filmed in around an hour. 
I personally feel that the shots we got were good. We managed to shoot a variety of shots including POV shot, long shot and over the shoulder shot. However I feel that we could have maybe tried to shoot from different angles. Trying out low angle and high angle shots would have been something which would have benefitted us when filming our final piece. 
Whilst filming the preliminary we learnt a few things that we would benefit our main task. After filming the first time we knew that using a tripod would be essential whilst filming our main task or it would end up looking amateur and unprofessional. We also discovered whilst filming outside that lighting was an issue. As it was only the preliminary we didn't worry too much about the lighting during the shot of Megan walking up to the house, however we knew that we would need to sort something out for the scene outside in our main task. We knew that Megan had garden lights in her garden so we knew that the lighting would be improved when filming the main task around the back of her house. We also decided that if this lighting wasn't sufficient then we would use torches as an extra light source. 
I feel that the filming of the preliminary task went well the second time round and helped us find solutions to problems that we would have faced in our main task beforehand so that when we come to film our main task these issues will be eliminated and we will be able to film to the best of our ability.


Editing
As I have a MacBook at home, I offered to edit the preliminary task. I used a piece of software called iMovie, however I had no experience of it so beforehand I watched the tutorial videos that I thought would be relevant to what I had to do. The editing of the preliminary task took me around 3 hours in total.
First of all, I uploaded all of the videos from the camera to my MacBook. I then used the storyboard to go through each shot and select the best one that we had filmed of it. After I had decided on the final shot for each of them I imported them all to iMovie. Then using the storyboard I started in chronological order of the shots and started to cut them down to the correct size. Once I was happy with each shot I dragged them into the project library where it puts all of the clips together. When I had done with with all of the clips I used the stabilisation feature. This is where iMovie analyses the clips individually and detects any shaking. It then smooths out the clip so shaking is limited. I thought that this would be a key feature whilst editing our main task. 
Once I had finished editing the preliminary task, I saved the video. I then it would be a good idea to continue to play around with the software using the preliminary task. I looked into adding an audio track, video effects and changing the colouring of the shot as I knew that these elements would more than likely be needed whilst editing the main task. 
Editing the preliminary task has helped me hugely to understand how the software works and I know that when it comes to editing the main task I will be confident in using it and editing the film to the best of my ability.