Evaluation of Preliminary Exercise

For part of our course work we where asked to do a preliminary exercise showing continuity.

Continuity task involves filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing the room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom he/she then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse and shot and the 180 degree rule.

I feel that when i first heard the task i felt that it would have been very easy and that no problems would arise, it was only until we started serious planning for the exercise that my group and i ran into difficulties.

Firstly we had to do some research on how we should approach the exercise, this involved creating a story board. To do this we used a piece of free software online “Comic Life” that allowed us to drag and drop images of the locations we where thinking about using into a story board template. I could start to see the group dynamic being formed with myself beginning to take charge of the group and trying to move us forward as fast as we could work in order to start filming as soon as we could which in hindsight was probably not a good idea and a possible better final piece could have been made with more preparation in the post production part of the preliminary exercise.

After finding our location and drawing out our story board, we started to think about possible characters in our exercise, however we where limited to whoever had a free period during our class time which we hit walls with when we appointed Oisin and Niall as our actors.

With our dialogue, we produced a rough guide in which the actors could edit to whatever they feel comfortable with. This was definitely the wrong way to go about this. This causes confusion and the actors waste time thinking of what they are going to say which increases the time in which we are filming.

When it came to the first day of filming, things seemed to be going well. The scene was set right, all the actors where there and we had all the cameras and tripods that we needed. The filming proceeded to go very well, or so we thought, until we got back to the class room to upload the footage to our macs, for this we used iMovie 08.

We noticed that some of the clips did not sync with the rest of the filming after we edited it down. We went back to the raw footage to realize that we did not film enough takes of the same scene. This meant that we had to do a second day of filming.

When the second day of filming came about we ran into problems again, this time with the actors. Once of the actors, Niall, that we used for the previous video would not be able to get out of class for when we had the time to do the filming, this meant that we had to find a new actor to play the Niall's role, which also meant that the entire video that we shot from the first day of filming could not be used, except the shots with just Oisin’s character. Excepting this we found our new actor to feature in our video, David.

Trying not to waste too much time of our second day’s filming we got straight to work with the filming, making sure to get the shots but also to get a number to takes in order to pick the best one back in the classroom when it came to editing it together.

When the filming process was over we came back again to the classroom to begin the editing process, as we did before. My group and i where fairly happy with the piece after we edited it together, however when we asked our teacher to tell us his thoughts he pointed out some of the thing we where over looking.

In this piece we over looked some vital pieces that are essential in the final piece such as sound, continuity and the 180 degree rule. The had a lot of shots where the actors where mumbling and covering their mouths when they where talking, we noticed this when we where filming but we didn't realize how much this effected the sound when we played the sound through the camera’s playback feature, this would involve us as a group being stricter with the actors in order to keep them doing the right thing and not to fall into these mistakes in future filming.
Also we got a bit carried away with our camera angles which confused the audience, when we where trying to film a simple piece while keeping the 180 degree rule.
Continuity was also a thing that we would need to keep a tight hold of in the next day filming and make sure that the characters are sitting in the exact same position from shot to shot and that all props such as the books in front of Oisin would have to be in the same spot from shot to shot.

On the final day of filming we felt fully prepared for the task at hand. The main problem that arose on this day of filming was the camera equipment. The cameras where not charged for fully and so when it came to filming we where limited to placing the camera near plugs. Luckily we only needed a few shots so this did not cause us a great deal of difficulty. We came back to the class room and edited the final piece that you can see at the end of this blog post.

There are some things that i would consider keeping in mind when it come to the actual coursework.

One thing that i will learn to keep in mind is sound. We realized that sound is a very important aspect in a piece of video like this especially when it is in terms of continuity. The sound has to be clear and edited in at the right time n order to seem realistically placed and also in order not to confuse the audience watching the piece. Also for the next piece we may consider using external microphone in order to capture the audio better such as the dialogue as the microphones on the camera may not be up to power when trying to produce our next piece of work.

Another aspect of filming that i will have learnt from in the next piece is lighting. It is so important to get the lighting right from scene to scene. We noticed this when trying to edit scenes together from multiple days and we couldn't because it looked too different because of the difference in the weather and the lighting of the location from day to day. We may try and feature all the filming on one day or have an internal location so if any more filming has to be taken place it does not have to depend on the weather.

One more point that i have learnt from the entire filming process is in relation to the groups work as a whole and the allocation of tasks. I feel that in order for a video like this to be successful each member of the group has to be pulling his or her own weight. On this point the allocate of tasks is very important as i found that at some point during this exercise, all of the members of the group where working on a single aspect of the process, such as the story board, when we could have had only one person working on that while the others getting on with other work such as looking at locations or scripting the video. Learning from this will allow me to save time in the future and be possibly better organized and produce a better final piece.
Some of the thing i would have changed with my final piece would include such things as a better script as i found myself being distracted by the actors improvisations when i could have been focusing on the filming and keeping in line with the guidelines of the task. Another aspect that i would have changed is a long time spent on pre production as a whole as i felt that we may have rushed into the filming aspect of it under prepared which possibly explains why we had so many errors.

Over all i feel that our final piece has turned out quite strong and keeps in line with the task we were given at the beginning.