Preliminary Task Evaluation

Preliminary Task Evaluation

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.

Continuity is the idea of a continuous scene or concept where everything must be correct. For instance clothing, and location must not change throughout the scene to create an effective continuous scene.

Match on action is a cut which splices two different views of the same action together at the same moment in the movement, making it seem to continue interrupted.

Shot/reverse shot is most commonly used within conversations, when two characters are speaking the camera will jump back and forth in time with the speaker.

180 Degree Rule is when filming you shouldn't cross the 180 degree line, otherwise the shot will be unclear.

Pre-Production

At the start of the pre-production we talked as a group and wrote down our initial thoughts for good ideas for this task, simply writing them down on an A3 piece of paper as shown here.

Right away we had a relatively good idea of how we were going to set this out with a good range of camera shots such as; establishing shot, mid shots, P.O.V shots, match on action and shot/reverse shot. Soon after our first draft for our ideas on this task we went back over it and refined it, bringing in new ideas for camera shots and camera movements that could be implemented into the task to make it better and more professional such as panning movement and tracking shots.

Once we felt that we had the a good layout of what it is we wanted to do with this task we started to create a storyboard, storyboards are extremely helpful because they tell you exactly what you clips you need to film with a lot of information on them such as the camera shots and camera movements needed, if it was interior or exterior, the location of the shot and brief notes of what the shot is about and what will happen in it; this is very helpful because you can think about it before the filming of your clips - adding many more techniques beforehand than you would think of if you were to make it up as you go along.

Overall, having a pre-production where we wrote down some initial thoughts, refined them and put them into a storyboard helped very much because it gives us an idea of what we want to do with the task (including many more techniques and making sure everything is right) instead of just filming the clips and thinking about them on the spot with much less thought meaning less techniques and a worse production.

Here is an example of one of the storyboards that me and my team did before the filming of the Preliminary Task. As shown in the picture, it includes all of the necessary information that we needed during the filming of the clips in this storyboard so we could simply follow the several storyboards that we created beforehand to film each clip much quicker, and with much more detail and many more techniques.

Production

Once we started to film the clips for our Preliminary Task we thought that it would be extremely easy to simply follow our storyboards that we did beforehand and they did help significantly throughout the filming of this task. However, whilst following the storyboard we had very good ideas in my opinion but without the right equipment and time we found that it was very difficult to get the perfect clips. For example, the day we decided to film our clips it was extremely windy and with the use of just an iPad and no stand getting the panning shot of the school from left to right was very difficult as it was impossible to get a steady and clear image throughout the pan.

Also, during the filming of our clips there are little things that we did not realise such as reflections and shadows of the camera or other members of the team. To prevent this we need to make sure that for the next task we film every clip more than once and then pick out the best one, or simply try to record the clips at a different time of day to prevent shadows etc.

Here is a picture from a clip we got in the task of a P.O.V shot where our actor walks towards the building. You can clearly see the iPad shadow in this picture - this makes the film look extremely tacky and unprofessional.

Overall, I feel that the production of the Preliminary Task went pretty well with good ideas from the start, however we just needed the right equipment to make it look good. With just the use of an iPad to film the whole thing it was very difficult. I have learnt from this task that we need to film every clip several times then pick out the best one, this helps because if we just film one clip for each scene we are stuck with that clip unless we go out and film it again, it would be much easier to film several at once then we will not be stuck with one bad clip. In the next task we need to try and use some better filming equipment, make sure that there are no shadows or reflections and to make sure we film each clip several times.

Post-Production

After we had finished getting our clips that we needed for our film we started to put the clips we got together and picked out the best clip for each scene to edit with. The ones with bad lighting, bad shadowing and unplanned events etc. For the editing process I used iMovie; as shown in the pictures below.

Firstly I imported my movie clips into iMovie, as shown below, for me to edit into my movie.

Once the clips have been imported I dragged the clips I wanted to use into the timeline on iMovie in shot number for me to then.

Once on the timeline the raw footage is not changed but the footage on the timeline can be. As shown below you can shorten a clip by simply dragging the sides and playing the footage until it is suitable.

When I was happy with the order and size of my clips etc I added music over the top of the movie. You can simply import music that you have on iTunes or on your computer into iMovie for use and you can also fade the music to make it nicer if it slowly comes to an end instead of suddenly stops.

At the end I added a "title" to my movie. The "title" I decided to add was some simple scrolling credits at the end of the movie. Again, very simple to do; just click the title tab and title you want and drag it onto the timeline.

Evaluation

Here is "The Joke" as a final product. In my opinion, for a first preliminary task, I think that it went very well. We thought of some good ideas from the start, we filmed the clips without many issues at all and it was overall pretty good. It didn't take very long to film because the planning was very good and detailed. On the other hand, there are some problems that need to be sorted out for the next task.

The first problem I found, right from the start, is that we definitely need to film clips more times instead of just one of twice so we have more clips to choose from when editing. Some example of this would be the first clip of the movie (the panning shot from left to right of the building), this clip is very fast and shaky which makes it look unprofessional and basically bad - if we filmed this clip several times then I guarantee we would have gotten a better panning shot to pick from.
Another example would be when filming a P.O.V shot of our actor walking into the main building you can see the shadow of the camera, which could be prevented if we took more time to sort it out.

Overall, I feel like this was a very good first task for me. The planning and filming went to plan and we knew exactly what we wanted to do to make the best movie we could with the right camera shots/movements and ideas. Next time there are a few things that we need to look at when making it better, but this was a good first try in my opinion.