Evaluation Activity 7- Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

With our preliminary task, it sort of started out as something we wanted to just get out of the way. However it got us thinking about different angles to use in order to avoid continuity errors, and stay inside a time limit. This mean't we had to ensure that everything was accurate, even if the character had actually moved 2 floors, we had to think about how to make it look he had just turned a corner, and how we could express that. This lead to us standing in different positions, and using different video's as inspiration.

Furthermore, when in dialogue scenes, and that how I discovered the 180 degree rule, which in fact I had never paid attention to it in Film's. This technique has its virtues, and has huge significance in dialogue scenes. The preliminary task taught me that continuity is a big part of filming, whether your shooting a film or an interview, it is important to set the scene and establish your characters in order for the viewers to be able to smoothly follow the action, and more importantly, understand what is happening. The 180 degree rule is simply that  2 characters in a scene should always have left/right relationship to each other, to ensure that the continuity is correct.

I also learnt that I could play with the viewers imagination by ensuring that I got my continuity right through the shot, reverse shot technique. This involved making a character look at a specific direction, presumably at something of screen, and then having a second character seemingly look back at the first character, who is now off-screen. The fact that they are looking at specific directions, and that the shots are being taken from specific angles, I learnt that you can sort of make the viewers emphasize more with the character, as they sort of become them since they are sussing what they are looking at. It is a very useful technique.

The preliminary task acted as a sort of guideline, and induction to the actual final product, as I let it all rip then, and ensured that most techniques where used in order to actually represent the main character. We used tripods to make everything more steady, and ensured that we actually used our camera angle's to represent Bradley Keano, as we were aware that those first few minutes of the film, were the most crucial.

The continuity reverberated throughout our Final product, which in itself, expressed how much of an impact it had had on us. An example includes when we showed the football scene, although their were many errors, we actually did a good job through the editing to ensure that it actually all went together smoothly.

-Liban Ali (Split Movie Co-director, Producer, Co-ordinator and Actor)