Our aim for the preliminary task was ; as a group we had to film a character carrying out various actions such as opening a door, crossing a room, sitting and then having a short conversation with another character. The short clip had to be a suitable length and ours ended up being 1 minute 17 seconds. The clip had to have continuity, it couldn't just be a load of shots randomly thrown together.
We had to put a lot of focus on planning, we designed a floor plan, script, and a story board for our filming. Unfortunately the member of our group who had all this planning was absent whilst we were filming so we had to improvise. We remembered from our planning how we were going to set up our line for the 180 degree rule so that we wouldn't break it, we didn't plan for things such as head room and nose room and this can be seen in some of our shots with mine and Bens heads getting slightly cut out in some of them. The purpose of each stage of planning was so that there was continuity throughout the short, lack of planning did lower the quality of our short which is disappointing, next time I will defiantly put more focus on planning. The planning had different stages to it such as designing a floor board which would show where we would be walking and where the camera would be positioned for different shots. We also designed a story board, although vast, which gave a basic summary of what would be happening in each shot. I think additional planning, such as outfits and lighting would be applicable to a longer film but I don't feel as if that is such a big deal in a shorter piece like the one we produced.
In our film we used a range of techniques and camera angles to create different effects in the shots.
The main technique/ rule we followed was the 180 rule which we put a lot of thought into when deciding the shots we would be filming. We used over the shoulder shots to put emphasis on the fact the characters were having a conversation, we used tilted/angled shots to connote ideas of power and vulnerability. We used a range of camera shots which I think keeps the viewer interested as there isn't focus on one shot for to long. We featured some more advanced shots as well such a shot reverse shot. We tried to feature the rule of thirds and i think we pulled it off quite well considering it was our preliminary task.
Some of the key things from this project which I learnt were; to check head room, in a few of our shots mine and Bens heads were slightly cut off which lowered the quality of the final piece. In future projects I'd also like to be able to edit the sound of the final piece to increase the quality of it, for this piece we only had the microphone built into the camera and because of this the audio of the piece didnt have continuity.
