Reflection For our As Media preliminary task, we were set the conditions, that in our video we had to have

the following features and media conventions: the 180 degree rule; shot reverse shot; match on action and we were given the basic premise of someone walking towards a door opening it, walking across a room and beginning a conversation with somebody. As you realise these parameters are rather undefined, which allowed us to experiment with plot ideas and narrative structure. This was our first stage, conception. To begin this process my group, consisting of Simran, Sarah and myself, bullet-pointed scenarios which could take place between two characters in a room. This first draft included 9 different sorts of ideas ranging from our chosen Gossip idea to full blown murder! This list was further refined to just 3 ideas which were, Murder in the Art Room, Drug Dealer and The Gossip we refined these by discussing which ideas would be feasible enough to produce or good enough for the production, and then eliminating those which were not suitable. Finally we decided upon The Gossip by taking a vote on which ideas we all liked best. I voted for Drug Dealer, but was outvoted by my team and so we decided upon The Gossip as our preliminary task concept. Once we had our idea, we could begin finalising what exactly would happen in our video, and thus the process of storyboarding began. We went about this by brainstorming what gossip would be taking place within the video. This was our first point to discuss as we believed it most important as this was what would be our main plot point and what would be key in engaging the viewer. Eventually we decided upon something controversial involving a teacher, we chose the school setting, as we would be filming in school and thus we could mask the fact we didnt have the resources available to us to film in a good set and thus we could continue the viewers suspension of disbelief. We decided not to reveal what the gossip actually was, always interrupting when it was close to the reveal, as this means the viewer can make their own interpretations as to what is going on and the story can be as wild or tame as they wish. We then moved on to physically storyboarding and planning each scene shot by shot. We of course allowed room for some flexibility, as some shots may not be be as good in practical as they were in theory and so some changes may needed to be made. Fortunately we only found this with one of our shots, where a long shot needed to become an extreme long shot as we didn't have what we needed in frame. We then set about writing a script for the conversation, as this would be the crux of our film and so needed to be engaging. We each went away and wrote our own version of the script for our self set homework, which we then brought in the following day. From these three first draft scripts, we had a table reading of each script to ascertain what aspects of each worked and what

didnt. We took all of the ideas that worked and amalgamated them together to form our final draft script. Now we had this, practical production could begin. In our practical production stage we could put in motion the ideas we had created and experiment with professional equipment such as tripods and different sorts of cameras. This stage was my favourite part of production, as we could see our ideas coming to life and it wasnt as rigid in structure as the pre and post production parts of the video, as we could experiment in different ways of using the equipment and it wasnt so teacher guided. During our production stage most things went to plan and we were able to film each shot as we originally planned. However, as always not everything will go as projected, as aforementioned with the Long Shot issue; another problem that we encountered was maintaining continuity between shots. This was an issue to us, as our filming took place of a series of days, so we could get the shots that we needed, and on each day no person is dressed or posed exactly the same. One such issue that we had with this was in one of the hallway shots, wherein Sarah was wearing tights one day of shooting and wasn't on the next, fortunately during the process of editing, we were able to mask this fact from the audience by using only one days worth of shots of her legs. This brings me on to the process of editing. For this process we used the computer program "Serf Movie Plus". Although this is not my preferred program, I used it because it was the simplest to use in conjunction with the operating systems on the computers that we had available to us. Several problems came about this program however, this included the fact that it was very lagging meaning that it was rather difficult to see if the transitions we had created were effective, all of which added to the tediousness of the editing process. We discovered that this lag was caused because all the files that we were editing came from a shared computer drive which when everyone edited at the same time put lots of strain on the system. We overcame this problem by storing our files on our computer hard drives which eliminated the problem making the whole affair much easier. This said, this was probably the hardest stage of creating the video as we had to ensure that in keeping with the naturalistic style of the piece there was a smooth transition between shots and things didn't look out of place or jumpy. This proved a problem with some of my shots, such as the conversation, as in some shots, the camera was closer to the actors than in others, making the scene look distorted and disorientating for the viewer. Thankfully, though I discovered that I was able to mask these jumps in camera position, by putting in different shots such as a close up on Sarah's face so as to hide from the viewer the jump. Finally, with editing process finished, we could move on to the post production process. In our case, this involved uploading the finished project onto our YouTube Accounts and then

going on to embed these videos onto our WordPress Blog. For me this process was relatively easy, as the computer that I was working on allowed me to upload the file directly. Others however found the process more complex as their Internet forbade them access and ability to upload due to restrictions on the computer, making the whole process a lot longer. In conclusion, creating our video was a difficult process that involved numerous steps, the most challenging of which was probably the editing, as even after much tweaking it still isn't completely seamless, so if we were to do this again, this would be the area of development that we would focus on the most so that we could further perfect it by filming in a more cognitive process by filming each scene as a whole then taking the shots we needed from that, instead of just filming the shots we needed and editing them together. Overall, the task gave me greater perspective on the work of the media and further helped me to understand the processes involved in creating a short film, behind the scenes as well as on camera, and gave me a better idea of how to go about filming and editing before I begin my main task.