Self-Evaluation: Rachel

Okay, so we all decided that we would do an individual evaluation of what we feel we have achieved during the production process as well as an overall evaluation of how we feel the task went, and what we have learnt. So this is what I feel like I have gained from doing this preliminary task:

WHAT I KNEW BEFORE:

At the beginning of this task, I was still wearing my GCSE-media brain, and was thinking that everything was easy, and continuity just sort of 'happened'. Well, I now know that it is a LOT harder than that, and even after spending weeks and weeks editing to the n-th. degree, I still feel like it doesn't quite flow (but then, I often find that I am my own worst critic), and also, we have tried our absolute hardest to do it, and hopefully you can see the effort that we have put into everything we have done so far. Also, I think that maybe my acting skills could be improved, but then again, we're not being marked on how well I can fall over, just how well the shots of me falling over match together, which I suppose is more important. However, if the acting was really super-duper good, then it might make the whole thing look more professional. All in all though, I reckon that we've done very well with what I managed to act out.

WHAT I KNOW NOW:

Something else I have learned about that I had no CLUE how to use before is of course, GarageBand. Before we started the preliminary task, I didn't know how to use it at all (but then, in Year 10, I didn't even know how to use a Mac), and now I think that, although my skills on there are far from professional level, they are passable. Actually, I would say that as a team, we are passable, because I have to give Roisin credit for doing most of the work on GarageBand, and the rest of us jumping in wit ideas from time to time. However, I will hopefully be able to practice my skills at making music some time between now and when we do our thriller piece, so I can contribute an equal amount to the rest of the group.

Overall, I feel that doing this task has help me come a long way in both my basic media skills, and more advanced techniques such as GarageBand. To me, this task has helped to bridge the gap between GCSE and AS, and hopefully, out final result will show how far we have come.

Today (26/11/2009), we watched each others videos and commented and generally evaluated them , based on criteria that the class decided as a whole. Seeing other people's comments made me see our film from a different perspective, and I now feel I am able to comment completely objectively on what our film truly is, and what I like about it. I feel that some shots, and transitions in our film look very good, and one part that I particularly like is the shot when I fall over, and then it straight cuts to the cans and bottle rolling across the floor. I feel that we have adjusted the sound to an appropriate level with this shot as well now, as before it was very loud. I think that, overall, I prefer the first half of our film to the second half, as we never really managed to make the continuity in the dialogue look quite as smooth as everything else. However, I feel that with the insert of Roisin holding the book that we filmed and added later, the whole section flows much better than previously. This is something that I feel we would not have done if we had not learned about different, more advanced shot types before we began this task.

I feel that we never really managed to make the Shot Reverse Shot that smooth, and it is definitely the one part of our film that I would change, or at least do again, if I could alter one thing about our film. Something else I feel didn't go quite as well as we thought it would, is the music. Lots of comments that we got back were along the lines of 'Random music', and listening to it being played whilst we were looking at other people's films, I can tell that we should have lowered the volume on certain sections of the music, such as during the hand-held scene, where, although the music fits (or rather doesn't, as the whole point is that it is disjointed, to match the character's sense of disorientation), it is far too loud, and sounds very added-in and false. On the other hand, I think during the tracking shot through the cafeteria, the music, and added in effects, are at the right volume, where they are not overly loud, but still discernible.

On the whole though, we got lots of positive feedback from everyone that matched my own views on how well I felt we did at this task.