Post three (A): Target Progress

1) The first and possibly the most prominent target for me this year will be to improve the quality of my camera work and continuity, last year both I and the group in which I worked struggled to effectively recognise when we had broken the 180 º rule, otherwise known as ‘crossing the line’ in our filming. This affected the continuity of our production and therefore obviously had a knock on effect on the grade in which we received for our final product last year. This year I will spend a great deal more time making certain there are no faults in our filming and do further research into vital rules such as the 180º rule to ensure we do not have the same problem this year.

The camera work in my year 13 coursework task has moved up notches in terms of it's quality, continuity and general quality; we were given a higher quality camera with which to film this year, PD150 SONY. Due to the faults that were present and pointed out to me in my project last year I became more aware of several points whilst filming. The first being the 180º rule, whilst filming I became very aware of it, therefore taking more time and effort to make sure the rule wasn't broke. This also led to me taking several different versions of shots, to ensure no rules were broken and that the continuity was the best it could be.

2) The second target I have set for myself will be based around the area of editing, next year I wish to not only improve on the areas I can already do on adobe premier plus but to try and successfully carry out new and original editing styles. As we now know the basics due to the editing of our products last year, this year I plan on spending a significant amount more time extending my skills on the editing suites as to boost the grades I could possibly achieve in our final product.

The editing in my year 13 coursework; initially to help with this task as independent study I spent some time in the editing suites getting a better understanding of the programmes I was using and learning about what would and wouldn't look successful for what we wanted to achieve in our short film. This year compared to last we had a significant amount more knowledge about what we were trying to create and achieve within our projects as well as more knowledge of examples, codes and conventions of what we were attempting to create.

In order to get a grasp on what kind of editing we wanted to carry out on our film we watched other shorts with similar representations and messages to ours in order to help us get an idea of editing aspects such as what kind of lighting we wanted to involve in both our editing and filming.



3) Due to the fact that in the approaching academic year our task is to create a short film in its entirety the process of creating a treatment becomes more relevant and there is now a need for character synopsises. Another one of my targets is to improve the detail in which our narrative and characters are developed. I will achieve this by holding more group discussions therefore deciding as a group a lot more detail about both the narrative and the characters.
Due to the fact that this year we are creating a short film in it's entirety the role of the central protagonist was much higher than any projects i'd previously created. In order to ensure that our character 'Grace' was as realistic as possible I participated in a large amount of independent research into abused children. I achieved this by firstly, spending a lot more time speaking with the other person I was working with, together we decided the correct way to approach 'Grace's' character. Once basic decisions were made together about our central protagonist e.g. sex and age we moved onto more complex details such as Grace's physical build and what we could represent through this.

The next thing we did was to research characteristics or 'give aways' of abused children - a lot of this research included reading 'real life stories' that people had posted online and browsing websites such as the NSPCC, watching their advertisements and reading what they do to achieve the help for children.






4) In this years main task we will be not only creating the film product we will also be creating a ‘postcard’ for our film in terms of marketing. To create the previously mentioned ‘postcard’ we will need to use Photo shop or a programme similar in function to edit the image. In the editing we will need to interpret the conventions so that it is possible to create a unique style for our marketing ‘postcard’ to match our film.

This years project was not only based around the film product but our also around our marketing skills, the way in which we approach the task of marketing our short film was as key as the quality of the film itself. In order to make our postcard as good as it could potentially be both me and the other group member spent a lot of time together brainstorming and coming up with multiple ideas for both the design and desired message of our postcard.

We also spent a significant amount of time researching what editing programme would be best suited to our needs during the process of creating the postcard itself, we used several on the school system and several on our own computer systems out of school.

 5) My final ‘SMART’ target for next year is to work on the improvement of my interpersonal skills, group dynamics are very important when working in close proximity with other people although never having had any real issues when previously working in these groups I believe that if the group dynamics had been better then as a group we generally would have worked momentously more successfully and the work would have been more equally split. So therefore in improving my interpersonal skills the group meetings that are held will be more productive and the group dynamics will be pleasant and easy to work with.

From the beginning of this year I believe that my interpersonal skills have improved significantly from the previous years. A necessary precursor of the positive effects on the improvement of interpersonal skills is that for the practical aspect of the course this year the class was split into smaller groups, of two sets of three's. Due to this fact, the communication within the group was key in enabling the work to be spread evenly and to allow the group to successfully complete the work task with a good atmosphere within the group and for the group to be essentially happy with the finished product. Our group acted well as a group with no tension or negative confrontation when anything went wrong, instead there was no singular blame and any opinions were taken as constructive criticism. We were willing to share our ideas and re-work our ideas until we were in a situation in which we were all happy with what we would be creating.

I believe that I achieved this target through establishing better and more positive relationships between myself and the other people within the group in which I am working within. The relevance of these relationships was that there was no tension which made group discussions pleasent, there were no arguments and generally I enjoyed working within the group and did not dread having to do either the practical work or the written work because I felt we were all cotributing evenly and all wanted to achieve smiliar standards in our work.