Evaluation Q7.

Question 7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

What brief were you working to?

The preliminary task involved making a video clip of a brief discussion, confirming that we contained four of the essential filming rules and methods; match on action, the 180-degree rule, shot reverse shot and continuity. We established these new skills by applying them in the video where a person opens a door to the room, sits down across/alongside another person, and has a brief phatic talk. This was beneficial in helping us achieve our main task, which was to make a two-minute opening sequence to a thriller film that we produced.

The preliminary task

Learning about the four rules of filming, we made sure we presented them in our preliminary video to show that we could use them successfully without any difficulty. During the filming procedure we were all comfortable with applying the 180-degree rule, as we simply used symbols on the boundary lines to indicate where we the degree while filming. But when it came to representing match on action, we had some hesitations about representing this in our video.  We captured certain parts incorrect, which did not show match on action as we had planned. For instance, we did not film the door being fully opened from the inside of the classroom, which also made it shortage continuity. We made sure to reshot this upon understanding our error and accomplished to be successful the additional time round.

Using the preliminary task to develop our final film.

Completing our preliminary task, I instantly become more assured with using the camera for more that one shot, such as over the shoulder shot, this shot makes it easier for the audience to see who’s talking from up-close more intimately rather than far away. I remembered that when taking this shot, you need to not cross the 180-degree line, and also the shot itself has to be taken from the characters shoulder that is speaking.

Shot reverse shot - we achieved to include this in our 2-minute film with simplicity. We used this shot a couple of times whenever a conversation would merge, such as the conversation at the opening concerning the psychiatrist and translator.

Continuity – Continuity was demonstrated throughout the film, by using these methods effectively. We also at certain scenes purposely made the film not continuous by using editing such as jump cut between Lucinda’s flashbacks.

Match on action- we made sure to contain this method that we learned from our preliminary task. We used this when Lucinda and the psychiatrist sit down towards the middle of the film. We did this originally to make it true-to-life from the audience’s perspective, and for the next scene to flow in gradually.

180-degree rule – whilst recording our final film, we marked a line on the angle that we was going to be shooting from till the end of the 180-degree angle in order to not cross the 180-degree line. If we hadn’t done this and we went over the angle, the film itself would not flow continuity and would not be edited coordinately. This was also related in the shot-reverse shot scenes of Lucinda and the psychiatrist. I believe that if we had not trained these shots in the preliminary exercise, it would have been challenging to understand and shoot in our 2-minute film therefore wouldn’t have been as high standard as we would’ve wanted it to be.

Improvements accomplished.

The preliminary task itself gave us the opportunity to wrap our heads around the basic understanding of how to use the camera and the range of shots to create a continuity overall in the video. By experimenting these rules, we gathered our own weaknesses and strengths and depending on those we decided to focus on our weaknesses, and that’s the main reason why now we all individually feel like we can use a camera without any difficulty, use variety of shots to create a meaning in a video/film, use editing on final cut express to create continuity overall for the film, and in general be familiar with all the things we have used throughout this process. We faced many challenges during filming, and at certain times became uncertain with the shots we had chosen before, but we worked strongly as a group and decided to challenge ourselves and use variety of techniques such as focus pull and shallow focus which we used with the camera, by doing this we got variation of shots and at the end we got a generally good quality film. I now feel a lot more confident with using a camera to film things around me by using different techniques and methods in order to create a story. I could also potentially use final cut express to edit videos and create a fluent film at the end, as I originally didn’t have much knowledge about editing before the filming process.