Marcelle - 7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have in the progression from it to the full product?

In my perliminary it was very roughly cut, there were sound problems and there was a lack of continuity. However, during it we did stick to the 180 degree rule and used shot reverse shot. In Social Suicide, we didn't use shot reverse shot because our narrative was mostly based around the hysteria of one person, Alice.

I did learn how to use the equipment properly so that we produced smoother camera shots without it being shakey like in the perliminary. We changed this through using tracks and a tripod instead of jumping over different characters shoulders. On the other hand, when we wanted to have shakey shots in our opening, we new how to make them effectively shakey thanks to our previous experience with our perliminary.

Editing our perliminary really helped us produce a better end product because we learnt not to make too many cuts between shots and if we did, not to take too many milli secs/seconds out between eachshot if we had to cut the clips down. This made it more jumpy in the perliminary and so we stuck to having longer shots and less smaller actions (like opening the door) to ensure our opening ran smoothly.

We did break the 180 degree rule, but what we learnt was that you can break the rule if it's for a good reason. We only went a little out of the 180 degree rule and onto the other side of Alice so we could get a good low angle close-up of her, and to create a raw uneasyness when she falls, drawing the audience into the scene/action further.

180 degree rule

    On the other side of the 180 degree rule 

The sound on our perliminary was tempermental because both characters had two different sound levels because they were speaking at two different volumes. We eliminated this by making sure our acttress spoke at the same volume and added non-diagetic music over it, to both create tension but also cover any background sound we couldn't eliminate on iMovie, making her voice sound clearer to the audience.

Overall, the perliminary exercise was very helpful in gettin to grips with the camera equipment and learning what and what not to do.