Evaluation

Overall this unit has gone well for me and any problems I had was rectified quickly. The final video was finished to a standard that my client said was 'brilliant', the video was successful in promoting all of the cars Grooms On Time have on offer to hire. The feedback I received was mainly positive with the one criticism being that we could have filmed at a nicer location, which I would do if I redid the video.  I completed everything the client asked for during our original meeting: the voiceover, the branding on the Jaguars, the subtitles showing the cars names and the use of customer testimonials.

If I was to do the video again I would try and film in a nicer location, perhaps at one of the buildings that their customers regularly use. I would also go back and get more of the detail from inside a few of the Jaguars as I struggled with these whilst originally filming due to the exposure. However I think my video was a good quality promotional video considering it was the first one I have done, there were a couple of parts that I am not happy with, however there are a couple of parts that I think are really nice, the pull focus onto the bottle of champagne as well as the go pro footage I used. During this unit I applied a lot of techniques that I had learnt this year: pull focus, voiceovers and the use of the slider.

I chose to use the camera slider to get a professional finish on the virtual tour of the cars interior. The slider enabled me to slide the camera into the car, on a tripod, smoothly. I also used the slider to glide the camera along the back seats, for when I was going to describe the leather seats; this meant that this piece of footage wasn’t shaky or jumpy.  However there were points where I wanted to use the slider but couldn’t due to the slider being unable to reach where I wanted it to. My original plan was to have the camera slide from the back seat to the front of the car and to then focus on the details in the front of the car. I managed to do my idea once however it looked messy so I came up with the idea of not using the slider but of taking the risk and doing it handheld. The result of this was that my footage was a little shaky but this was easily fixed during editing when I put a stabilizer on the footage.

I chose to include some of my favourite camera techniques in my promotional video that I had learnt and developed over this year. I played around with using the dolly and tripod; I ended up using these to show the cars driving onto the locations drive.  I also experimented with the camera’s focus because I like how the pull focus draws attention to the subject of the camera. I used the pull focus a couple of times in my video to pull the attention onto the most important things that I wanted to promote, these were the Jaguar hubcap and the bottle of champagne. I wanted to focus on the Jaguar brand itself as this was the biggest selling point of the business as people want to buy into a well-known and classic brand.

The first problem I encountered was having to reschedule my first filming session due to the weather. The rain meant that I was unable to film the cars because the owner didn't want to uncover them all and get them wet, this also would have affected my exterior car shots as the rain drops would have made the shots look messy. I quickly resolved this issue by rescheduling to another date. This second date was where I encountered my second problem. The second problem I faced was also due to the weather, however this time it was due to the sun. I still went ahead with the filming despite the sun meaning that no matter how many times I changed the ISO and the aperture of the camera it was still ridiculously overexposed however I focused on the interiors of the cars instead. I still got a few bits of exterior footage and fixed them in editing with a colour corrector.

One issue I thought I was going to face was getting the permission or having to pay to film outside of Coombe Abbey. However because I am not a professional and it was my clients Go Pro I avoided having to do either of these which meant I didn't have to spend any money or waste time waiting for permission. At the start and end of my promotional video I used an image of all of the cars owned by the 'Grooms on Time' company in front of one of the locations that is regularly used as a wedding venue, I didn't need to get permission from the owners of the building themselves because they had already given permission for the image to be on my clients website and whatever the clients wanted to use the photos for.