Reflective Blog Entry On The Main Exercise

For starters, on first appearance, the main exercise is much more intense, serious and professional than what was expected from the preliminary exercise. During the preliminary exercise, our group was allowed room for mistakes for improving our knowledge and understanding, whereas in the main exercise, mistakes are final and will cost us greatly, so there is a lot more responsibility. As well as this, more editing and technical issues nee to be employed as this is our chance to show off our best abilities. Instead of making a sub-par recording, and editing them together basically and with structure, now we need to record something that looks polished and professional before we even being to edit it. Also, judging from mistakes in our last exercise, our group needs to be slightly stricter on ourselves. We may need to meet up far more outside of class to plan things just so we don’t cram and rush things in class time. Also we need to be far more organised when it comes to our recording, which is the most important aspect anyway, without a good recording, then our whole project will not be successful, so concentration in particular is needed here.
Mostly our group’s organisational skills will be put to the test as they were not up to standard on the last exercise and if they are similar on this project, we will lose marks. Though it wasn’t a fault in the last project, the stress of this main exercise may cause strain in relationships in the group. As I am the producer of this title sequence, I need to be over-looking and powerful to gain the work I know we’re capable, but I don’t want to come across as a slave driver or pushy. Falling out with team members could result in a really poor final outcome, as communication is key.
We will base a lot of our plans on work from the research that we do. So the most important thing to consider is picking very specific social realism films to study and anaylse. So we have decide to begin our project looking at the 2 films 'A Way Of Life' and 'Love + Hate' and how they're opening sequences aim to conform the main codes and conductions of the genre it's within. Begin are the opening sequences as posted from Youtube.
'A Way Of Life' - Amma Asante (2004)


'Love + Hate' - Dominic Savage (2005)


To improve my own performance, and hopefully influence that of my team members I aim to:
• Check and double check all planning and pre-production work to make sure that all team embers are clear on the chosen ideas before we move on, confusion later on will take up time and effort in trying to explain
• Listen and understand other members opinions and ideas, I can be very dominating and tend to argue more my choices, but if the project is going to be successful, a mix of all ideas and input will be vital
• In recording and production, be clear on all shots and camera angles we need BEFORE going out to start the filming. Going on unprepared will be the worse case scenario as we will have no idea where we want to go, and what we aim to achieve there. This can be solved with recee’s and picture taking to capture ideas we have on first visit of the area.
• Choosing actors and extras wisely. Asking friends and company to be in it may not give the right ‘look’ that we’re trying to achieve. This is also the same for props and dress codes. We’re trying to get a cross a lower working class look, as a well dressed person would look out of place and confuse the narrative.
• One very specific thing we need to do is record empty frames before and after performance takes place in each frame. It gives us more room to edit, and cut out the excess, and stops us from cutting off words and actions we might want in the final cut. This is what happened in our preliminary exercise. It made our work snappy and strange.