Evaluation: Question 7) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

The below four clips are clips of my own work. Two clips are from my match-cut preliminary exercise and two clips are from my thriller opening (I had to upload them onto four different posts because they did not all fit into one). The first clip of the four clips is one the clips from my preliminary exercise and as you can see, we have a very rough-looking, medium close-up. This has not been filmed very accurately and the lighting is very bad! At this point, we were still beginners in the filming world and we did not think much about the quality of the work that we were filming. When we completed filming the shot at that time, we were very proud of ourselves but now we realise that the quality of the shot should have been much higher. We have dramatically improved on the filming of our close-ups and managed to shoot a superb extreme close-up of a spinning fan (in the third clip of the four clips). This shot was commended by all that saw it. I am very confident that this shot displays how much we have improved since shooting the match-cut preliminary exercise: the lighting in the shot is perfect and we have edited to work in conjunction with the appearance of one of our titles. The shot looks very professional and the medium close-up shot from our match-cut preliminary exercise looks a tad tacky in comparison to it!

The second clip of our four clip is an example of how we broke the 180 degree rule during our match-cut preliminary exercise. I have to admit, when we were first taught it, I found it very hard to understand. Even during the match-cut preliminary exercise, I still didn't quite get it. When I watched the clips back, however, I could then see where we went wrong and I finally understood the 180 degree rule! Nonetheless, the mistake still appeared on film and made our preliminary exercise look very amateur. In the fourth clip of our four clips, a clip from my thriller opening, demonstrates how much we have improved on our since filming our match-cut preliminary exercise. In this clip, we are over-laying two clips very effectively to show what the character is going through whilst experiencing this dream. This clip is one that combines both effective camera shots and editing. The camera shot where there is a hand writing on a whiteboard is shot as a medium-shot and it is over-lapped with a hand-held shot of our character in fitful sleep. This took a while for us to learn but we got it down in the end. At the beginning f the course, I had no idea how to use the editing devices provided but now, I am very confident in doing so.

In general, our match-cut preliminary exercise is quite basic compared to our thriller opening as it does not incorporate the effects, higher skilled editing and higher quality camera shots that our thriller opening contains. These things, however, all had to be learnt through trial and error and we could not have reached the final level that we have reached in our thriller opening without having performed our match-cut preliminary exercise.