Preliminary Task and Evaluation

In our As Media class, we were giving a preliminary task to complete. The preliminary task was to: Film a scene which involves a person walking into a room, siting down and having an exchange of dialogue with someone.

We had to plan our scenes on a storyboard with the shot types that will be used in every scene. After creating a storyboard, we then had to make a shot list which had all the different shots that would be used throughout the preliminary task. When we showed our teachers our plans and got their approval, we were allowed to go out and film our scene. We had to work in a group of three, one person who is working the camera and the 2 people who is involved in the exchange of words.

When we managed to get all the footage that we needed then we used Final Cut Express to use all the footage and put them together to create a final production. This is my final production of the preliminary task:

Evaluation:

Overall the whole production went very well, we have not had that much experience with a camera however with the use of the tripod (at times) we were able to record our clips and used Final Cut Express to produce a good video. We did well to use the camera shots that were needed to be seen in this task (Establish shot, Over the shoulder shot, Match on action and Shot, reverse shot) and we did well to obey the rules of the 180 degree rule, making sure that the person who is seen on the left, always stays on the left and never broke the 180 degree rule and moves to the right. We managed to keep a continuity with each scene so that nothing looked out of place and if there was an error then we tried to fix it using Final Cut Express so that it continued to look like a continuity footage. We managed to keep our film mysterious and giving out enigma codes to the audience, this made the film more exciting to watch and more intriguing to the audience.

I believe that the task went well however we did experience some problems while we were filming. The first time we filmed our preliminary task, we broke the 180 degree rule numerous of times which meant that we had to re-film the scenes where we broke the 180 degree rule. On the day of the re-film, one of the actors was not in; leaving only two people to do everything and at a result of the absent meant that the camera man had to become an actor and we had to re-film the whole preliminary task over again. This took up a lot of our editing time, but we managed to re-film and edit before deadline day. While we were recording the first run of the preliminary task, we kept rewinding the tape which caused problems for the uploading and took more time from our editing as we had to wait for the clips to come before we could edit.

Although we had problems with our productions, we managed to get everything done, sticking to our plans that we made, the shot types we said we were going to use and managed to get the re-film and editing on time. We have learnt how to keep inside the 180 degree and how to break it and we also learnt to not rewind the tapes in the camera as it cause problems when it came to uploading. Using what we have learnt will help us later in our As Media classes when we are faced with similar tasks.