Preliminary Task Planning, Filming and Editing

Planning

Over the past 3-4 of days, as a group we have come up with a solid idea for our preliminary task. We decided on the storyline relatively quickly and wrote down our idea. Our idea was to show a school kid being told off by the headmaster and to show a lot of different camera angles of this situation. We also decided that we should choose one or two camera angles each that we would like to try. We then drew up a story board which demonstrated the camera angles and movement we would like to try in our scenes. We also came up with our group 'production' name :
BLOB PRODUCTIONS

I decided on trying to position the camera underneath a set of stairs as the child walked down them. I thought this might be effective because it would clearly show that the child is coming down the stairs and it would also add a bit of mystery to him because we wont be able to see his face. I also suggested that we should use an over the shoulder shot when the teacher or headmaster is telling off the school child as this would make the teacher or headmaster seem more dominant and powerful as we can not see his emotions.

Criteria

The prelinary task criteria suggests that we should obey by the 180 degree rule,

The 180-degree rule is an imaginary line or the axis of action drawn across the frame or screen. It is the location where not only action or the direction a subject is moving, but it is also the sightlines, or the character’s direction of vision. Once shooting has begun, the camera operator needs to stay on one side of the line in which they initially started shooting that particular action.

It is explained clearly in this video :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdyyuqmCW14

The criteria also says that we should use dialogue in our preliminary task. We decided on using only a little dialogue as we wanted to concentrate more on camera angles and movement. The line that we used in our preliminary task is :

"So what have you done?"

We decided on using this question because it hints at sarcasm and that the headmaster or teacher already knows why the kid has come to see him.

The criteria also says that we should use match on action and it occurs when an action that begins in one shot is continued of completed in the next shot. So we decided that we would use match on action when someone walks through a door and one shots shows the opening from the outside and the next shots shows the closing of the door from the inside.

Filming
Before we started filming properly, Callum and I went around certain places in school trying to find good spots to place cameras in order to take full advantage of light and location so that there would be as little background sound as possible. We found a few good places that we decided to use in our preliminary task for example under the stairs and walking through a door near these stairs.


The location of our preliminary task is set around MS1, the stairs and corridors around this room. We decided to use MS1 for the teacher's room because it had lots of natural light and we thought that we should take advantage of this because it would be easy to film camera shots and angles in there. We decided to use the stairs and corridors near this room because they also had good natural light. The stairs allowed us to be able to film from underneath so we could get a good camera angle of the child walking down them and the corridors were quite wide so it meant we were able to track the child with camera movement.

During the preliminary task we all had a go at filming and helped each other out and we gave each other opinions on how we could make a certain shot better. This was very helpful because its always good to see shots through other peoples perspective. I think as a grop we worked extremely well and we were all focused on the task, evidence for this is that we managed to get all the shots needed in the space of about 40 - 45 minutes. I think it was important we all had a go at handling the camera especially for me as this was the 1st time i have used a video camera therefore i gained a little bit of experience which will help to prepare me for the real task. I believe the shots i filmed were good for a first time and so was everyones in the group. We all also took photos of us working and different camera angles we used on Callum's camera so we could use to put up on our blogs as part of our preliminary task write up.

Editing

Editing the preliminary task was easier than i thought it would be because Sony Vegas looked hard and confusing to use. After i had understand how to cut scenes shorter and bring them together i found it quite easy. This also gave me valuable experience needed for the real task. Editing also gave me a chance to look back at our camera shots on a bigger screen and i still thought they were quite good for our first attempt at filming. We came under a bit of difficulty in the editing stage though because we realised that one of our scenes seems to fast forward or something and this slightly blurs the camera but we believe that it isnt a major problem and that we will learn from our mistakes and we managed to rectify our mistake by cutting that part of the scene and the scene still flows.