Wednesday, 11 November 2009

The Brief for the Priliminary Exercise

To complete a continuity task involving filming and editing a character walking to and opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another charcter, with whom he/she then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. The task should demonstate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree line rule.

For this project I worked with Emily Stansfield. I filmed the first half while she held the microphone then after Kira (our actress) entered the room we swapped roles.

Priliminary Excercise Clip

Priliminary Analysis and Feedback

On reflection the exercise was one that we learnt alot from. Our focus and dialogue was fine but we had trouble keeping to the 180 degree line rule as the rest of our class pointed out, which made our film look awkward, from this we have learned never to stray from this rule, and to choose one side and stick to it. However with that being said our class enjoyed the opening of the sequence - the steady camera movements that tracked Kira's feet. And they also liked the camera cutting from Kira walking toward the door to a close up of Kira's hand opening the door handle. At one point there was a camera wobble, which helped us to learn that the cameras are very sensitive to jolts, this can be avoided by not aloowing anyone else to touch the camera whilst filming. When it came to the rule of thirds and framing, we were proud of our two-shots but not overly pleased with the amount of head room we gave, as it created a lot of dead space, this has taught us that in future we must use tighter shots. Doing this would also help to keep the eyelines on target as they did seem a little too high. We also made a slight mistake when it came to continuity; in the scene when Ben (our male actor) is talking to Kira, in one shot his hand is down then the next shot of him continuing to talk his hand is up. I did not notice this until editing, this could have been eaily avoided if we'd payed closer attention to detail, and by after filming each shot, going back and viewing it in order to spot these details before carrying on filming.

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