Progression from ' The Rush' to our main task, 'Delinquent'

This was Abbie and I's first preliminary task. We were given the idea to do something very basic that allowed us to gain some experience with the camera equipment and the editing equipment. I think that this helped us greatly in the main task, not simply with the experience it gave us with the camera equipment and the editing technology, but also with the knowledge it gave us with different shots, angles and lighting.
I have already discussed the errors we made in this preliminary task. These include:

• Shots used are too short, in terms of time, when they should not be. For example, the over the shoulder(OTS) shot of the girl sending the text message transcends from an OTS to a zoom close-up so quickly that it may discomfort the audience. This should be avoided in order to gain more of a professional film.
• Sound should remain under control. In this film, there is a great deal of unrelated diegetic sound from our fellow media students and other members of the school. This has quite an unprofessional effect on the film!
• The lack of continuity in this film, with Abbie's clothing for example, may confuse the audience
• One of the most apparent mistakes in this film is my inadequate camera knowledge. When Abbie walks down the stairs, for example, i zoomed in too quickly, and had to zoom out again. This has an effect of making the entire production look quite amateur like.

I feel that we didn't make any of these mistakes in 'Delinquent' because we learnt from these.

Some comments on this preliminary film include:

"There was a good use of zooming to emphysise on certain things, especially on the mobile phone. Paning and tracking shots were used well to show the setting and to show where the charactors were going. To maybe improve on this work, you could try and keep a steady camera when using the tracking shots and to make the zooming shots at a more consictant pace than being quite jerky." Nilesh Patel

"I really like your use of zoom, and the shots are faded out well, this links the shots together nicely. I think the tracking shots need to be slightly smoother and diagetic or non diagetic sound would be lovely." John Radley

By Catherine Gough