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

Our preliminary task took very long to complete - longer than it should have - due to poor organisational skills within our group. It was difficult organizing the location to be free for us to film and at one point we had our filming completed and editing complete before the final cut express program failed to save our project. We then decided to make a new script from scratch and chose a new location for filming, and we managed to complete it and edit it together within a day.

The poor organisational skills and the consequences of this drove us to construct a schedule for our opening sequence task, so that we all knew the dates and times for what we wanted to do. In this sense, I learnt that organisational skills are key from my preliminary task.

The preliminary task was good practice for script-writing, helping us in our later construction of what we believed to be realistically flowing conversations and actions. However, the script was weak in formatting as we had not yet learnt the formatting skills for making scripts from our course. In our opening sequence, I wrote many drafts for a script, until it was formatted like an actual script and until it represented the narrative we wanted to tell in our opening sequence. Despite this, our opening sequence did not necessarily follow each and every element of our script, and we completely removed the end, where another customer intrudes on the scene.

In our preliminary task, I was on the role of a cameraman and a director and played a key role at editing, although in earlier attempts at the preliminary task I was just an actor. These tasks helped me to develop my skills in all of these areas, which I used heavily (barring camera, which was very minimal) in our actual opening sequence, as an actor, heavily involved with directing, and a key editing role. It helped me to piece together dialogue from different takes to form one scene which kept the free flowing dialogue as if I hadn't edited it at all. On watching my preliminary task, it also helped with editing because I spotted some continuity issues such as lights being on or off, or the actors being positioned in slightly different ways in one shot after another. It also obviously helped immensely with directing actors and the camera woman (Phoebe) in many shots as I was able to work out what looked right and what didn't look right.

The sound issues in our preliminary task were obvious, with volume levels rising erratically from one shot to another in a way that sounded unrealistic and abrupt. For our opening sequence, we chose to edit on an overlapping sound clip of traffic, which was captured in the shop itself while we were there. This helped in keeping a natural flow to our sequence so that other cuts in sound were less noticeable to the audience. We also used other methods to disguise such obvious problems, such as using a loud eerie soundtrack and overlapping it onto our scene, drawing the audience's attention away from the sound of traffic.

In both tasks I have learnt directing, camera, editing, sound and even acting skills. I was involved heavily with each of these aspects in our opening film and skills like being able to direct actors effectively, make editing as subtle as possible and having good cinematography skills will help enormously with future filmed projects.