Preliminary Task Evaluation

This is my evaluation for my prelim video task. Our task was to edit a short video, including a number of different shots.

The first job for my self and my partner was to draw up storyboards for the video. This, in my opinion, was the hardest part of the task. When drawing up the storyboards, we had to think about how our actors would be blocked, and how long each clip would be. A lot of the clips were a lot faster than we expected, mostly due to the length of time it takes to say a sentence seeming a lot longer in our heads. But some clips were also cropped to help our videos continuity.

I feel that when I do this again, it would be a good idea just to time how long it takes to do something, or act something out, so as to get the timings more precise.

When it came round to our turn to film, the room we had planned to film in was occupied (with people editing their videos, no less!) so finding a new room was in order. After changing our storyboards to suit our new environment, we began filming. This took a lot of patience, as many scenes had to be re-filmed (The establishing shot was filmed at least 8 times) due to background interference and giggling fits.

When behind the camera whilst filming and directing, it was quite fun discussing how to best get a shot. Whether it was best to use a tripod (0:23-030) or to hold the camera freehand (0:43-0:49).

Overall I felt that the filming side of things went relatively smoothly, we included all the shot types we needed (and a few extras). However, I would have liked to have re-shot some clips, just to make them flow more smoothly in the final product.

Editing was the part of the project that took the longest, requiring a few free periods to finish up the project. Between Adobe Premier crashing and files going missing, we learnt how to deal with the various problems that faced us.

Editing the video was fun in itself. After laying out the clips in the order we wanted them, we began to crop them to flow into each other. Where we had several clips, there would always be a discussion of which one fitted in with the clip before it better.

Once we had our continuity in check, we did some slight alterations to the clips. A few of the shots had a reddish tinge to them (0:29-0:39). But this was easily changed with a slight change of the colour balance.

Once the video was finished, we experimented with which file type to save it as, finally deciding on .wmv, due to it’s quality an versatility.

Overall I felt that this first task went rather smoothly, the occasional hiccup now and again only helping us to improve on what we were doing. If I were to do something similar in the future, I would probably focus on making sure that the clips were the closest they could be to the storyboards before taking them to the cutting room.

And that’s about it. Hope you enjoyed that :D, and when I have time (probably tomorrow), I will post some of the extra pieces I have been playing around with alongside this.