Preliminary Task

Preliminary Task

Last week we stared to look at a preliminary task which would be part of the final coursework to making out opening sequence of a Thriller.The brief for our preliminary task was:

"A continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/her then exchanges a couple lines of dialogue. 

The Task Should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule."

To be able to complete this task, my group and I had to create a storyboard in order to be able to have an idea of how and where we would be filming and we would be prepared. the storyboard will ensure we included everything we needed to in the film.

The first page of our story board. 

 The second page of the story board.

Match On Action

A common technique used  to cut from one shot to another view that matches the action that has taken place in the first shot. The use of match on action creates continuity. If a character begins an action in the first shot and completes it in the next, a visual 'Bridge' is created which acts as a disguise the cut from one to the other. This makes the scene flow.

For example, opening and walking through a door is filmed in three separate stages, but it is later edited together to make it appear as if it was filmed continuously.

Shot Reverse Shot  

Shot reverse shot is a film technique wherein one character is shown looking (either on screen or off screen) at another character, and then the other character is shown looking “back” at the first character. Since the characters are shown facing in opposite directions, the view unconsciously assumes they are looking at each other.   

The 180 Degree Rule

The 180 degree rule is a basic film editing guideline that states those two characters (or other elements) in the same scene should always have the same left/right relationship to each other. If the camera passes over the imaginary axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line. The new shot, from the opposite side, is known as a reverse angle.

The Final Video 

When we started the filming it went very well because we had a clear vision for what we wanted the end production to look like. However with anything there were a few difficulties along the way which we manged to clear up. We were not able to pan as smoothly as we like because the tri-pod was very stiff when turning so it made our work look like kinetic camera movement. There was also trouble with the sound because the camera its self picked up a lot of ambient sound even though that it what we were going for we did not want them to be very loud. A lot of noise from students walking up and down the corridor made it hard to hear the characters on scene because they were not heard. to avoid this we had to re shoot some of the footage Overall we did not have as much trouble filming and we are very happy with the final product.

Editing

When it came to editing all our footage together we used iMovie on a Mac Book laptop to put it all together. With all the footage we shot we had almost 7 minutes worth of different shots, although we did not need to use all of them. The final clip is only 33 seconds long. The editing was longer than we anticipated because of all the footage we had, as we had to go through it all and make sure that we got what we needed. We initially struggled with how to use the software, but we got the hang of it. We added effects to our clip such ad fade to black at the end and had a scrapbook theme layout as it transitioned from shot to shot.