Evaluation question number 7

Preliminary Brief: Film and edit a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character. A couple of lines of dialogue must then exchange between characters & match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule should be demonstrated.


Main Task: The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes (all video and audio material must be original, produced by candidates, with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source

Looking back on my prelim task I feel that there are m things which I have learnt many things from it which have helped me in m recent work. Our prelim task consisted of making a 30 second mini film of two people meeting up and having a conversation. I this we had many things to remember like the 180 degree rule and reaction shots. This was all very new to me. This gave me practice, and a small insight of the amount of planning involved in making a film. Over all I would say that, that task went rather well as I found the editing process of this very manageable. However my partner and I made the mistake of not installing the sound equipment, giving us no sound in our sequence. This was my biggest lesson learnt from that task. Although it is very obvious equipment check is extremely important. That mistake helped me to know how to deal with the production of my main task. I constantly checked the camera’s spirit level, made sure angles looked go d and that everything supposed to be in a frame was in the frame. This was done due to a previous mistake. I also learnt no to be afraid to make changes if something does not look right. For example in our main task we originally wanted a wide shot of the kids in the classroom, and a shot of a white board saying ‘silence when in ‘detention’. However when we reviewed our rushes, we saw that those shots did not work and needed to be taken out. As well as in postproduction we also made changes during the production. We originally wanted the geek to have a nose bleed during the pan, to be a bit symbolic of her being the reason for these deaths and having their blood on their hands. We went with that idea for ages but however on production we decided that it would make more sense if Bianca, had a nose bleed, this would give her an even better reason to leave the classroom.

The prelim brief and task was similar to the main one, but there differences still remain. I found that with the prelim task we had less planning to do as we were limited to a 30 second sequence. This made everything short and very easy to remember the time we took to shoot was very short as well, this put a small amount of pressure on us but it was enough. Regarding the story, I feel that we were more restricted. This is because it was to be about two people meeting and having a conversation. These people had to be shown walking to their meeting places individually before being seen together. In the main task there was much more discussions and more ideas involved. This was hard because for me it was with people had never worked with before, so we had so many different ideas to choose from. However we were still kind of restricted because our stories had to be based on a fairy tale or show a few themes from the selected fairy tale. The planning was very intense compared to the planning done for the prelim task, but because we had done this before I was prepared.

Main task

Organising ourselves was much harder as we had much more to do compared to our prelim task. We organised our self through lots of planning and meeting up together to get our ideas and concepts together, so they would be strong.
We arranged this by shooting schedules and storyboarding, this helped us not to waste time as everyone knew what they were doing, this prevented waste of time and needless complications. Regarding actor and character
We also allocated roles to each member in our group in advanced and carried out two rehearsals and therefore made running the shoot a lot easier. Everyone knew the role they had to play and this made it a lot more efficient. We used this method during filming of our film opening sequence and this really helped as it took a lot shorter to shoot than it could have. This is something which cannot be said d for our prelim task; although it was easier to carry out we had a lot more complications, probably because we were not as prepared. This is another ways that the prelim task has helped me learn and improve.
Prelim task:

The planning here was less stressful, as it was as mentioned before a very short sequence which we were producing.
Story boards were easy and I think we followed it pretty much to the T. everything was like in the story board. This is a difference to the process in our main task as during production we changed and added a few things. We had a few problems with our cast but we overcame that quiet easily. Because we didn’t have any rehearsals before shooting with our characters the directing was a bit harder than in our main task, however the script did not really involve too much so it was not too hard for our cast to understand. A big mistake we made in this was not setting up the sound equipment properly; the film came out good however we unfortunately lost our sound.
From making our prelim task to our main task I have learnt:
*the importance of planning as everything plays a big role in postproduction as well as production.
In our prelim task we did not add final changes to the original script which was given to our cast so sometimes we had to stop to remind cast of their lines. In this there were two people as cast. We were able to get one persons number but not the other, so when it was our time to film that person did not show up and we were not able to contact her so we had to get a replacement.
* I have learned from my mistakes, and made sure equipment was set up proper by having our director do at least 2 sound test before we started filming.
In the prelim task my partner received no sound in our sequence, as the sound equipment was not installed properly. Another problem we faced was lack of time as we had to our filming on the next day as we spent too much time filming for one group. So time was another thing which I learnt to control in order to get everything done. In our prelim task another problem we faced was people walking in our shots and making too much noise. So for my main task this was an issue that we prepared for during planning. We looked at the school time table and decided to film during lesson and take 10 minute breaks between classroom changes to make sure no one would get into our shots.
* have learned more variety in my shots. In my prelim task everything was very basic as we mostly focused on reaction shots. In our main task however we had to include many more shots for the film to have a certain effect on our audience.

Overall I have mainly learnt the importance of planning. I now know that everything is there for a reason. A story board being very important to the planning process as it allows you to know your shots and is basically your film on paper. A shooting schedule helps you plan out your shooting times helping you to be organised, as well as your cast. This helped us a lot as we had a lot of people involved in our sequence. Continuity sheets area also helpful but I think, most helpful when making a long sequence. It helped use know weather a take was good or bad but regarding costume our cast constantly stayed in the same clothes so that was not really a problem to fill out. All this planning helped us to make everything the way we intended it to be.