At the beginning of the preliminary exercise the idea of making the video was exciting. The exercise sounded both fun and interesting, mainly because I have never made a full video before. I have used video cameras before though and this gave me an extra interest in the task. I was also hoping to improve my skills with a camera during this task allowing me to take better framing of shots etc.
I was interested in using the skills I already had, such as my previous experience with a camera, as well as improving my weaker attributes. For example time management and research skills. During the planning stage it was required to plan out a schedule of what we were going to do on each day. Doing this allowed me to keep better management of the tasks we were set to do and keep track of things in a more organised way. Furthermore it enabled us to do the tasks in order. Also, searching on the internet for videos with similar themes helped improve my research skills. I feel that I have improved both time management skills and research skills during the planning stages.
At a few points in the planning process I was slightly concerned that the assignment had so much scope and so many ways that it could be completed that we may over complicate things too much. However this proved not to be the case as we set what we wanted to do fairly early on in the planning stage. This allowed us to concentrate on the shots and other elements rather than getting distracted on changing the idea later on.
Usually when I am set a task or a project I don’t plan as much as I should. This can cause parts of the task going wrong at a later stage causing major problems. Doing a task this way can be more time consuming than first expected as you think you are saving time from skipping out parts of the planning stage. But during the planning stages of the preliminary exercise I have found that it is very important to plan carefully what you want to do. For example, instead of going out and filming straight away, we planned all our shots which let us see problems with certain shots or angles. By doing it this way we saw any problems almost immediately and could pick which shots worked best and fitted together.
