Lessons Learnt from the Foundation Portfolio {[Hollie]}

I have learnt many new skills from the excercise last year, most of the skills which we used I had never encountered before, for example Foley sounds, camera work and editing skills but many skills were ones which I already had but I just needed to build on them.
I learnt that I need to be very organised and good at planning because the blog demanded that we state every piece of research and content analysis that we did during our course work. These are skills that I am already quite good at and I think that this task has helped me develop these skills further. For example: trying to organise film shooting at the train station was very difficult as the people who manned the station where extremely unwilling to help with our enquiry, eventually we managed to film at Balcombe station which was a very quiet station and where we would not disturb any commuters who where using the platform. This took a lot of organisational skills and effort as the people at Haywards Heath station where so unhelpful. I think this really motivated me and taught me that if you do not try your hardest to get what you want then you will rarely achieve it.
Another key skill I learnt from the preliminary exercise is that I do not have to be in control all the time. I am quite good at working in a group but I tend to try to take over as I like to over-organise things. This task has taught me that I do not have to always be in control and I will take this with me, however, I did find that during the making of our thriller I had to take control and manage the situation sometimes as otherwise things would not have gotten done in time. I often had to motivate my other group members and make a schedule of when we where going to do things as I often found it difficult to arrange a time when we were all available and I found that my group could often not organise or motivate themselves very well so I had to step in.
I would also like to be more time-efficient in the future and plan more as the days of filming and our editing time was not as well thought out as it could have been. Other areas also lacked adequate planning but most areas were well thought out such as the story board and the research of the blog.
Another thing that could have been improved was our storyboarding as it was not detailed enough and although we all tried to help jack to make a more detailed storyboard we ran out of time and so in turn the animatic did not get done. This happened both in the preliminary and again in the thriller piece and in the future I will defiantly keep an eye on this area of planning as I feel it lets us down.
In the editing process there were a few things that could have been improved such as the train door scene which was a bit jolty as we had to make the train stop in position by ourselves as we could not control the speed of the train on the day of filming, however, we used our editing and filming time efficiently.
During editing we had to try to create continuity in the footage so that the viewer did not notice our cuts between shots, we also had to keep to the 180 degree rule which we did very efficiently by always keeping the camera to the left side of the set. We used fades effectively to show the passing of time. For example, during the train sequence at the very beginning a green train is shown approaching the station but there is also a shot of a purple train leaving the station. I wanted to use both these shots as they where very effective and by putting a fade in between them we could show the viewer that they were two different trains and suggest to them that a long time is passing for the character on the train.
Lastly, from last year I have learnt many good skills from the use of the camera to editing software, I had never used Garage Band or Final Cut Pro before and so I had to teach myself or get help from one of the staff. I am now much more confident in using the cameras and the editing software and I think this showed in our peer evaluation in which our group got the two highest scores (1s and 2s) for editing, sound and Foley and whether it worked as an opening to a thriller. I will take these skills with me to use in the future and try to improve on my camera work so it is smoother next time I carry out a task like this.