Evaluation

Overall I think the course so far has been successful. At the start of the course we started our research for our contextual work. The research went really well as I had a lot of books to look through which i got a lot of information from and we also took a trip to Coventry Uni Library . the trip to the library really help0ed as there was books there that i may not have been able to get my hands on so i took the opportunity to photo copy every bit of information i could. Once i had finished my research I made a start on the contextual. I think that my contextual work went quite good as I have never been very good at writing essays but I feel that my writing skills are now at a higher level. it also helped having plenty of research to write about. I also learnt How to use Harvard referencing which i thought was going to be really hard but turned out to be not that difficult.

The filming in the course was really enjoyable. I really liked going out and filming on location and learning about different camera techniques. When we first went out to film on location every one was a bit nervous about it as we were worried about people looking at us which, in Nuneaton we did get. This changed when we went to Oxford to film as it is a popular destination for tourists so we just looked like any other group of tourists. We used Nuneaton to film more "gritty" scenes or locations especially at Fife Street Park as there was vandalism on the kids playground and used condoms on the floor. This all added to the gritty feel and we managed to get some really good footage. Oxford was the complete opposite and thats why we went to film there. everything was really picturesque there and we got some really good footage from there. Before we went to Oxford we made a plan of what we were going to film and where. we decided on three main locations which were The Turf Tavern, Jericoh Street and an old record shop. We managed to get two out of the three as we didn't have time to make it to Jericoh Street as we were stopping on the way to different locations to film at other good locations such as an old fashioned sweet shop. The sweet shop was a really good place to film and we got some of our best footage filmed in there. We also spent quite bit of time in there because we were getting really good footage and we had permission to film in there for along as we wanted to. Another really good location we filmed was in an old record shop/coffee shop as the owners were really nice and said we could film as much as we wanted. In the record shop we got some really good cutaways and we got to try using the Boom mic. The boom mic did not go successfully as will did not realise that he was holding it next to a speaker, but we got to practise with it.

I feel that my "Blogging" could have been better as i should have put more videos of footage and i should have went into more detail when discussing various things. The reason why i didn't spend as much time on my blog as other work is because I'm not a strong essay writer, i spent most of my time worrying about that and writing draft after draft trying to get my grade up as much as possible rather than putting more effort into the blog.

The editing of all the footage was my favourite part of the unit as it finally gave me the chance to put my own creative feel to all of the footage we filmed together. at first I wasn't going to have a narrative or theme to my film but when i got more into the editing i realised that i was creating a theme with out realising it. The theme is of a journey to different locations and i have shown this through how i kept cutting back to a shot of a car wing mirror whilst the car is moving to represent the travelling part. Then i have used different shots of different locations along with different cut away shots. Because i have taken influence from New Wave cinema i have put innovative camera movements in my film to show this. We had to put music over the top of our film and were told that a sensible choice would be Post-Rock as this starts off slow and builds up. The music I chose was by a band called Peace and the song is called 1998 and it works really well with my film as different sounds at the start of the song fit the timing of my jump cuts that i put in.