Preliminary Exercise

The purpose of the Preliminary Exercise was to demonstrate continuity by filming and editing a character opening a door. We had to illustrate the shots and techniques that we had learnt in lesson time, such as the 180 degree rule and the shot reverse shot.

Our group came up with the idea for the script by simply listing all ideas and concepts that were suggested by my group. We decided to create a very straight forward dialogue of an eerie masculin voice calling out the characters name continously. We decided how we were going to structure our order of shots as well as where we were going to shoot and how. We allocated roles to everyone in out group so that everyone had a job to do.

I believe that our planning and storyboarding was not very organised as we did not fill our shot lists out in a correct fashion which meant when we came to post-production we were quite unorganised. I believe if we had created a clear shot schedule then our planning would have been more efficient and organised.

 Below is our shot list:

Shot 1) Establishing shot of Omar opening the door and walking into the shot.(eye-level)

Shot 2) A Long shot of Omar walking towards the camera.(eye-level)

Shot 3) High angle long shot

Shot 4) Low angle establishing shot as Omar walks into the shot.

Shot 5) Mid shot of Omar attempting to open the door from outside the room.

Shot 6) Mid shot as the door opens from inside the room.

Shot 7) Close-up, Reaction shot of the expression on Omars face.

As our planning was not as efficient as we expected, we had some difficulties when shooting as we were unsure what order to shoot in which made it difficult to keep a clean and organised shoot. This delayed our shoot for 15 minutes, other than that the shoot was quite efficient.

Screen Grabs Demonstrating the Techniques Shown in the Brief

Continuity Exercise

Continuity is how fluent or clean a sequence is considering pre-production and post-production.

This is a short film clip which presents the application of continuity and how it changes before production and after production. We were asked to include a small amount of dialogue. In the shoot we learnt how to shoot basic tasks such as opening a door and learning how to capture the shots of a conversation between two people. We created a rought cut as well as a final edit.

Rough Cut

Final Cut

The aim of this activity was to practice shooting and editing basic actions to seem continuous. In this case we had to encapture a character opening a door in our shoot. We had to consider the different shot types we were going to use, the location of the shoot, the order of shooting and the diting of the exercise. This activity would help us when creating our coursework in the future.

Our finished sequence was quite successful as it flowed continuously without any problems. The editing when the character is near the door was fluent. The camera moves very clean and smooth when it follows the character. The shot types selected were appropriate for the shoot; for example, when a character is walking the shot is long and it paces with the character, and when both characters are having a conversation there is a variety of shots such as face to face shot, the over shoulder shot and the close up shots. The shoot was reasonably efficient as we shot all our clips very quickly however, there was some background noise which caused a few distractions and this disturbed our shoot.

If we had to improve the sequence I would clean up the ending as it is quite blurred as well as a sudden stop which seems unfinished and unprofessionally shot. I would also reshoot the sequence from different angles without stopping the clips so that there are a variety of angles included in the sequence and the clips would flow exceptionally well.

This activity taught me how to shoot and edit the basic activities using final cut express. I learnt that you should always shoot you equence in different angoles and you should let the shoot flow so that the editing process would be easy to refine and clean up. I also learnt that you should move along with the camera when a character is moving, this is so that you do not loose the character in your shot. This activity helped me practice how to edit shots perfectly so that it uses continuity.

Compared to THE ACCIDENT this task was very successful, as the accident lacked continuity throughout. This pre-production was more organised as we actually thought clearly about the type of shots that we were going to include, the order of taking the shots and the way we were going to link the shots together. The production was very efficient as we knew exactl what shots we were going to use and the order of the shots, this helped incredibly this meant that we did not have to take that many takes of each shot. Post-production was very easy as we simply had to just clean up a few mishaps to make the sequence flow. Realisticly, the successfulness of the pre-production strongly influenced during and post-production.

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