Planning: Preliminary task - Miss Begum

The purpose of a preliminary task?

the purpose of the preliminary task is familiarise your self with the camera and film different shots confidently and efficiently. It also helps you gain insight into how to use the camera and helps you gain skills in editing. Moreover it helps identify group members individual strengths and weaknesses which helps us identify what jobs to give each group member to create the best opening scene with everyone set at what they are most skilful at. It is also useful as it helps group members improve team working skills and learn to work together.


Preliminary Task: 

Narrative/ Scenario:
 Bibi is peacefully doing her homework in Miss Begums class. She is politely interrupted by her friend Gulustan asking her where Miss Begum is. Bibi tells her Miss Begum is absent due to her illness and they get into a conversation about what Bibi is doing. When she tells Gulustan she is completing her homework, Gulustan is shocked as she has forgotten to do the homework so they decide to do it together. As they begin to do the Homework Gulustan realises how pretty Bibi's bracelet is and the scene ends


The group roles:
Gulustan- Director, Actor
Natalia- camera person
Bibi- Actor

As a director I was expected to direct the group into different parts of the scenes efficiently. I was in charge of the actor's body posture, position in the setting, and the narrative idea, with contributions from the group. I also directed Natalia in what cinematography technique to use in each part of the scene.

Natalia was expected to film steadily using cinematography techniques. This was the most important role in the group as she was doing the filming. She used different techniques including panning shot and zoom in.

As an actor Bibi was asked to look as realistic as possible and write her own dialogue according to the narrative. I was also asked to write my own dialogue.

The editing role was taken upon the whole group as it's considered one of the hardest stages as none of the group members had edited before. We used many different editing techniques to show our broad understanding of different editing techniques.

What I found difficult with filming and how I overcame it:
I found the acting difficult as it was challenging to make it look realistic and off script. Also although the directing had some difficulties, as a group we decided it would be appropriate to keep me as the director as that was my strong link

As a group we found using the camera tough as we hadn't used one in detail before. One of the difficulties we over came was zooming in. The zoom in button was too delicate and moved fast so we learnt how to use it subtly so the zoom in is presented clearly.



What I found difficult with editing and how I overcame it:
Editing was one of the hardest processes as no one in the group had edited before. We found it challenging to decide which editing technique would be appropriate for which part of the scene. However, we overcame it by using different editing techniques to show our broad understanding of editing techniques and scene analysis with the scene.


What I have learned:
I have learnt that editing and cinematography techniques make the scene more interesting and without them the scenes tire the audiences eyes. Also we developed our preliminary task as a group which helped us improve our team working skills and showed members of the group, our strengths and weaknesses in the production making process.



Conclusion:



In conclusion the preliminary task has been very useful as it has given us skills in using a camera and editing. It will also help show the progress we've made with filming when our final product is finished. Finally it has helped us identify our production roles.