Preliminary task take II

I was sure that this piece of work was going to excel the last one in all ways, and with this in mind I set about planning. Ollie and I, firstly decided on the camera positions we would use throughout the filming. We decided to start the piece with a close up shout of the first character at the desk, and then a wide shot of them looking towards the door, this was to be followed by an over-the-shoulder shot of them looking towards the door, thus fulfilling our aim to include an eyeline match in our piece. The next shot should then have been a close up of the second character turning the door handle and then a point of view shot from the perspective of the first character  of the second character entering the room and then sitting down. There should have then been a succession of point of view shots  having the conversation which would have fulfilled our task of including shot-reverse-shot. We then planned the dialogue which went something like this:
C1: “What do you want?”
C2: “Individually wrapped glasses wipes.”
C1: “I’m afraid we’re all out but we can offer you an alternative.”
C2: “Show me the stuff.”

During filming we didn’t manage to complete all of the shots we originally planned to do because of time constraints and because of this we didn’t get to use the rule of eyeline match in our video. Other than this a and the fact that the room was too dark, the filming went okay, and the sound recorded well.

During the editing process, we realized that the overall professional look of the film was hindered by our lack of footage and the dark light we filmed in. As well as this, we didn’t have time to match up the video with the audio effectively, thus making the whole film look less than amateur.

This task was apparently supposed to be the improvement on the last film we made… Well that didn’t go to plan. The list of things that went wrong are endless – but on the bright side at least I know what to change next time (that’s what I said last time). For a start, the room we decided to film in was far too dark, we knew that as soon as we set up the camera, but by then it was too late. Added on to this, we had the problem that the video and audio didn’t correspond correctly. With more time, I’m sure that we could have fixed this and that this wont be a problem in further filming tasks that I’m set to complete. However, these weren’t the only problems we encountered during the making of this film: we also noticed that we didn’t effectively use the eyeline match because of lack of filming time. But we did effectively use bothe the shot-reverse-shot rule and the 180 degree rule.

Preliminary task evaluation

Well that didn’t turn out as expected! As a group, after the planning, filming and editing process, we were fairly proud of the work we produced, but after looking a little closer at the final piece as a class the flaws identified were uncanny. We took the time as a class to go around the room watching each groups video in turn and then evaluating it from a critical point of view, in hope to make the next piece of filming better. Considering that this was the first time most of the class had used some of the specialist equipment, such as the voice recorders and the boom pole, my partner and I managed to use it quite effectively except in the instance where the boom pole was visible in one of our frames and in a few shots, the character voices are noticeably quiet, perhaps due to the fact that the microphone was not directed lose enough in the direction of the speaking character.

We noticed faults in the filming such as characters heads being cut off as they walked into shot, and the swapping position of characters during the filming which we then found out was because of a lack of abidance to the 180 degree rule. We also had continuity errors in our final piece such as slight movements in character positioning such as different placements of the arms and hands.

I think that most of the errors made were only made because of lack of knowledge in the area, and now that we have identified the mistakes, the same ones will not be made in futher pieces of work. Other errors that were made were made mostly due to the time constraints on this piece of work.

Overall, I am pleased with this piece of film as a first time AS attempt.

 

 

Preliminary task editing

We were given fifty minutes in which to edit our first piece of A Level film, in this time we were required to put the film clips in order detach the set audio and to attach the audio we recorded during the filming process. For this, we used the final cut program. I found this software difficult to use at first, but soon picked up on how to use the different tools and functions in order to give the film a professional finish. A factor that made this task easier was the fact that both my partner and I had used the software before, but it was just re-familiarizing with the program that took some time. Our video ended up being around 25 seconds long by the end of the editing process or cropping footage and selecting the best takes of each scene.

(not mine^)