PRELIMINARY TASK EVALUATION

For my A2 Documentary Pre-Liminary Task, I was put in a group of two to film a small documentary. The task was called 'Its Good To Talk' and was about mobile phones. We were given a set amount of questions and had to film an interview of someone answering these questions. At the start of my A2 course, I had previously looked at the codes and conventions of a documentary interview so knew the basics, it was just about putting them to practise in this Pre-Liminary task. I was familiar with the camera work and editing software from my AS course so was able to work well with them. But as it was our first time filming an interview we did make some mistakes, but it was good to identify our mistakes so that we can correct them for when we film our main task.

Once we had finish making our documentary, we viewed them all as a class and were able to give each other some constructive criticism and also to identify were we went wrong ourselves. 

The first mistake we made was that our opening graphics ran over some of the filming which meant it was sat over our interviewees face for a couple of seconds. this means that for our main task we would either have to make sure it is just the graphics on the screen, but will run smoothly into the clip or position the wording so that it is not over the interviewees face but still visible. When playing it back we noticed that the music was a bit too loud so we will have to experiment a bit in our main task to make sure the background music is at the right level. Also we should have used an instrumental because a background song with lyrics is too distracting to the audience. At the end of the documentary, we should have used a fader to fade the music out so that it just just cut straight at the end. At the end of the documentary also, we didn't put any credits, the documentary needed rounding off, which we will have to do in our main task. the positioning of the interview was probably our weakest point of the interview. We didn't follow the rule of thirds and our interviewee was positioned in the middle of the screen rather than to the left or right. After looking back and getting this constructive criticism though, we know to make sure our positioning of the camera and interviewee is right at the start of the interview and that that is one of the most important things to get right because some interviews we will not be able to redo so easily. 

Although we put phones in the shot to comply with the mise-en-scene of the documentary, the background was distracting as it was in an english room. We now know to plan ahead for our main task to get a plain background that we can adjust for the mise-en-scene. As we only had one lesson to edit, our jump cutaways were not as good as they needed to be. Looking back at our documentary I can see that the cutaways need to be edited to the second with no blank spaces and at the right timing, with the voice over running over it and for the right length of time also with no gaps. Our cutaway shots need to be planned our more thoroughly also with shot types planned, to make sure no faces are cut off and we get the right things in the shots. During our cutaways, we had filmed them free handed which made the clip shake and distracting, which has shown us that in our main task we need to always have the camera on the tripod and adjust the shot and the camera to get the perfect shot.

I think it was really good to do the Pre-Liminary task because i could see what potential mistakes I could have made in the main task, and now know what to do for the main task. I have been able to practise that filming style of a documentary interview, therefore it will be familiar during the main task.