Evaluation Of Preliminary Task

Our preliminary task was : "Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door,
crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then
exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action,
shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule. "(OCR website)


We decided to film on school grounds as the corridors and outside space was good for our task which included running, and stairs to add some diversity to the run allowing the audience to the see the running from different angles and perspectives also. 
To begin with we filmed a low angle shot of the actress running up the stairs,this shot went particularly well because the camera was positioned perfectly and made the transition to the next shot smooth and this created the effect we intended.

Next the side view of the actress's feet running up the stairs was good because it was aligned to the 180 degrees and made for accurate continuity and it followed the action well.

The next shot was a long shot depicting the run coming straight at the camera,this created tension as it showed the actress needed to get somewhere quickly causing the audience to wonder what her motive was.We filmed this well as it showed the actresses entire body and the full extent of her run however this shot is not aligned to a 180 angle that we wished for because we had a faulty tripod.

One of the first shots we did was of the actress running, and it was a side view of her running to the door, and after filming we realised that the camera was not evenly balanced on the tripod therefore the shot was not at a 180 degree angle, which compromised the continuity of our entire clip, as the position of the camera changed ruining the flow of the scenes. 
The next scene was the actress opening the door and we found this scene difficult to film, as finding the right angle for the camera was difficult as we wanted it to look simple and realistic. We also had to consider that the actress wouldn't block the shot from the angle we chose, and would not cover the door handle or any part of the door. Eventually we were able to film this  very effectively, and used a side view showing the action fully. 

The next scene we chose to do depicted the two actors sitting opposite each other about to have an conversation. To show this scene we decided on a establishing aerial view which showed the two actresses. However we found it difficult to find a heigh enough position to show a clear aerial view, we stood on a chair and it still did not give us the height we needed, also the tripod was not tall enough to reach the height so we had to hold the camera as high as we could to get the right view, and it was difficult to keep it stable to not give a shaky shot. In this scene, we had decided to have low key lighting, and we did this effectively, dimming the lights and we blocked out any sunlight in order to create a darker effect. 

When filming some of our earlier scenes and watching them back, we realised that  sound could be heard of the background of one of the clips, and it was speech, the word "go", therefore we had to edit the clip to get rid of any background noise and speech, to increase the continuity of our clip. We edit our entire clip anyway so that the whole clip would flow better. We followed our storyboard and added in jump cuts in the appropriate scenes, and match on action cuts were used when the actress was running. 

To show the speech between the characters we used over the shoulder shots on each character,we positioned the camera perfectly aligned with the characters shoulder in the view of the shot with the other characters face in the background.We did this very well.

However we did not follow the entire plan of our storyboard because when designing our preliminary we did not think about what would be totally possible and logical to do. 
We have no credits on our preliminary task or our company ident because at the time we were finishing developing our company ident.
We filmed one particular scene that was conversation between the two characters was filmed very well from a low angle however when we came to editing our preliminary we unfortunately couldn't recover the clip which took off about 5 seconds from our preliminary, shortening our over all task and we could not find the time to re film this clip so we had to go without it. 

In conclusion we think that we filmed the preliminary task full to the specification however several of our shots were shaky and not aligned properly and we experienced several technical difficulties.So we feel that we could improve on this by using in our main task by using a steady tripod for our shots.In the future to avoid losing any of our footage we will back up our clips onto different hard drives and USB's so we have several copies so we will be able to recover them should they be lost from one place.