Josie's Preliminary Task Analysis:

Preliminary Task Analysis:

Have you fed the fish…? The title of the task is enough to make an audience laugh, and so my group (Ella, Sam, Tom and myself) wanted to make the audience think the opposite of joy and laughter. Our aim was to create shock factor, which we would have done if our sound were working, which it wasn’t. As there was no speech to be heard, we thought to put up subtitles so that the audience knew what was going on.

We faced many difficulties when filming, and even more when editing. One of the difficulties we faced was the weather. It was a very cold day, with the threat of rain and our camera was not as steady as we would have liked it to be due to the coldness. There was also a man running/jogging in the location that we had chosen to film, which we saw as a negative but managed to spin into a positive thing by the man not knowing what we were doing, and so just not making eye contact with any of us, which we chose to see as him being afraid of what was going on (in our actual task and not in general).

Whilst editing, we faced a problem when we realized that the sound was not working. After the initial panic, we put our heads together and decided to use subtitles. After coming up with that idea, we had to work out how to use it on Imovie, which was a task in itself. Having neither of us used IMovie before, and our combined limited experience was not helpful in the slightest, until we worked out how to use subtitles, even then it was difficult to place them in the exact time space and we were not sure what length of time to leave them up for.

Making the preliminary task did help, with the continuity editing mostly. And most of all, the task helped us to practice different camera shots and angles, which we then analyzed to mean different things. For example, the use of a low angle showed the audience of Patrick’s (The Boss’s) superiority over me (his work monkey). The basic editing skills that we learnt were very helpful, and Final Cut is a bit easier to use as it has less limitations and clearer labels. The fact that I have used Final Cut before helped our group (Lucy, Ewa and Joe) to understand the progression of our film. I was able to give a quick tutorial to the group, and we all chipped in and helped with the editing and input all of our ideas together.

The preliminary task allowed everybody to practice things they wouldn’t normally try, and I really enjoyed working with the people I was with (for the preliminary task) because all of us had creative, bright ideas and the determination to put them together. At the beginning, all of our editing skills were limited, but now we could probably make a film in our sleep. The confidence in all of us have massively increased from the start, which has had a knock on effect in our other work.