PRELIMINARY TASK

For our preliminary task we had to film a scene where a person walks through a door and sits down and holds a short conversation with another person. We began planning our task by thinking about the narrative within our scene. As we had to use over the shoulder shots as well as shot reverse shot and the use of the 180 degree rule, we wanted a conversation where the audience can see the characters react to the conversation. After coming up with conversation we created a storyboard so that we could plan and see how our scene was going to fit together as well as reminding us of what we had to do if we had to go back and record.

The first time we went out to film we chose to use a door that lead to outside. We wanted to use different locations to make it different and more interesting. However, while we were editing our clips together we encountered a few problems. While we were filming loud music began playing in the atrium and so you weren’t able to hear the dialogue properly and so the audience wouldn’t be able to hear what was going on. Also we found that the distance from the door to where Morgan was sitting was too long and so we had a long shot duration, we tried to film this by using a panning shot but were unable to as it we either had a close up shot of Ashleigh walking or her head went out of the frame.




This meant that our clips didn't fit together as well as we had of hoped, the match on action also didn't flow properly and it appeared to keep jumping with the shot changes. The next lesson we rethought about our choice of location, we wanted to continue with the idea of starting outside and walking inside. We thought that the front of the college was an ideal location for the filming of our task. After filming our clips we edited our task in ‘Final Cut Pro’. We found that our clips fitted together better this time and our match on action worked better. However, after we finished our preliminary task and watched it back we realised that we had broken the 180 degree rule.

This disorientates the audience and should be avoided when filming a conversation or a scene involving two people. When we did the over the shoulder shot we found that we could have moved the camera so that we had more of the person’s shoulder in the shot as there was slightly too much room of the other side of the frame. However, we liked that the audience were able to clearly see the character’s reaction and facial expressions. The problem with filming from the outside and them filming inside is that the light and sound didn't match that inside the building as there was less light outside and then there was lots of light as you walked into the building.

Outside there was not much noise and it was quite quiet and so as we filmed inside the building you could hear people talking and so there was an audio continuity error. Along with the change in lighting this would disorientate the audience and may become confused as they may think that it is a change in scene. However, we thought that where we filmed the lighting was quite effective as there was a sufficient amount of light and so there was a lot of interesting shadows which made the scene look quite effective.

In doing this preliminary task we have learnt about how to use techniques such as shot reverse shot, over the shoulder shot, match on action and also the 180 degree rule, even if they didn't work out as well as we had hoped. We have also how to use the basic editing techniques on ‘Final Cut Pro’ as well as learning about how to use different shot movements and angles. This will help us within the production of our thriller title sequence as we will understand the basics of the media technology we will be using.