Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

When looking back on my preliminary task it becomes startlingly obvious that my personal ability and skill in film-making has improved vastly over the duration of the AS Media Studies course. The quality of filming itself lacked steadiness, each shot was badly framed and 'wobbling' - this was counteracted in my later work as we used equipment such as a Tripod and FigRig which steadied and straightened our shots where needed.

In the preliminary task no real consideration to mise-en-scene took place. Costume, lighting, make up and setting wasn't thought about - we wore the clothes we happened to be wearing, used the natural lighting through the windows and filmed wherever was free at the time! After the careful construction of mise-en-scene in 'Premonition', I can now see how lack of consideration hinders audience understanding of the film - for example, the fact that Kayleigh who portrays the teacher character is wearing similar clothes to my own although I'm portraying a student character makes the storyline and characters hard to understand when watching the sequence.

We also didn't use any soundtrack in our preliminary task (only diegetic dialogue), at the time it didn't really seem relevant but after studying film further it is clear that soundtrack helps the flow of a film as well as understanding of the film's events. Even adding diegetic sounds for everyday objects such as the toaster sound in 'Premonition' enhances audience understanding and continuity/realism greatly.

Most importantly, my grasp on continuity editing has made a much needed improvement, both in filming the correct shots to create the effect of continuous flowing film and editing these shots in such a way that enhances this. Simple techniques such as match on action have been mastered to a greater level in my opening sequence for 'Premonition' - for example when Damien picks up and opens the red box (filming and editing that particular sequence took the longest but is the most effective example of continuity editing in the whole film). In my preliminary task we tried to master 'Match on Action' with a sequence of throwing paper in a bin, although this appeared to be effective at the time now with much more informed and intelligent hindsight it it clear that our editing of the shots wasn't precise enough and there is a significant 'jump' between the scenes which hinders the 'flow' of the film and is unrealistic.