Preliminary Task Evaluation

For our preliminary task we had to make a short opening to a movie using the list of shots we were provided with. This task was very helpful as we were able to learn a number of skills such as reverse shots and we were able to learn from our mistakes so that our real opening sequence .

One of the things we did to do very well were the reverse shots. We weren’t able to do the 180 degree rule so when we were editing it did not feel as if person A and person B were talking to each other. When we were filming the shots we focused too much on getting the camera angles and the shot lengths right and we forgot about the 180 degree rule. If I'm honest, we actually didn’t know what the 180 degree rule was but we were silly and didn’t ask!

In the shots that we filmed, when person A was speaking to person B the camera was on person B's right and then when we filmed person B talking to person A the camera flipped and went onto person A's right instead of their left so we had crossed the action line. When we were editing our film Mr Roberts pointed this out to us and after a lot of explaining we finally understood what we had done wrong.

On the other hand something that we had done well were the matches on action. Every time we had person A going though a door we filmed the entire action from both sides of the door so that when we edited it we could make the actions match each other at the right time and have them flow into each other.

Another thing which we need to work on for our real opening sequence is the lighting. A lot of our shots were very dark and people may not have been able to see all the actions clearly. As our idea for our real opening sequence is to have a happy rom-com genre we need the shots to be bright ad well lit.

One of the things that we learned from this task was how to use a tripod properly. We were able to get a feel for using both the monopod and the tripod. Personally I prefer the tripod because someone like me who has incredibly shaky hand can film something without it being too wobbly. Also the tripod had a sprit level so that we could make sure that we didn’t accidentally have a cantered angle. We did have a slightly off angle in the very first municipal shot of the building but hopefully it is not very noticeable.

We also learned how to time shot when filming them. We allowed roughly 5 seconds from when we stared recording to when we cued our actors, this made editing SO MUCH easier since we weren’t worried about accidentally cutting out a bit of action. We also learned that we didn’t need to make some of our shots so long as the first time we edited the some of our non-action shots we made them to long. When sir was watching our film he said mentioned that they may be too long and we realised that the audience really didn’t need that long to digest what was happening in the shot and if we gave them too much time then they may get bored. We then went back and made a few of our shots shorter and found that the film flowed a lot better.

All in all I think that the preliminary task was very helpful as we could learn a number of skills in one go and find out which things we were not as good at so that we know to pay more attention to them when doing our real task.