The task

JEV


This is Ellie, Valeriya and Josh's coursework. The pages are set up to show development process through research to promotion and then onto our final piece. We were asked to create a 2 minute opening of a film. Here you see the process of which we plan, develop, film and edit our opening. We have used the blog format to present our work and have filmed certain parts.


What the task was


Preliminary exercise: continuity task involving involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character with whom he/she exchanges a couple lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot, and the 180 degree rule.
Main task: the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.


Difficulties we encountered

In the preliminary task we spent a considerable amount of time deciding on our storyline and plot as even though we had several ideas we struggled to come up with one that we could actually produce in the short time we had. After we eventually had an idea to work on we found it hard to reflect the storyline within the shots and had to rely rather heavily on dialogue to ensure it was clear and the audience could understand the story. As it was our first time using the equipment I personally took some time to become accustomed to the camera which meant taking some time to complete all the shots, an example of this is shown at the end of the actual video when the camera suddenly tilted upwards and again when Ellie stood up leaving her head out of the frame. Again as it was our first time, editing was a slow process and looking back it wasn't quite as smooth as we could of perhaps made them.


What we learned about filming


I personally became a lot more comfortable operating the camera, I learnt how sensitive it was necessary to be with the zoom and how to pan effectively. During the task I got the chance to experiment with several different shots, and how you can make a scene much more interesting by shooting from different angles. Moreover it became apparent that it was important to film as much as possible from different shots as when editing if a problem appeared with one of the shots then it is extremely time consuming to re-film. Finally during the filming process we realised how important planning and in particular the storyboard is, as a good storyboard allows the filming process to run much more smoothly as you know exactly what you want and how your going to do it.

Josh