Preliminary Task

The Preliminary Task

The brief of the task is as follows:

“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/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. The task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.”

Match On Action

Match on action is a very simple but essential technique, where the perspective of the camera changes during a scene and the scene continues to flow. If a character begins an action in the first shot and completes it in the next, a visual “bridge” is created which acts to disguise the cut from one to another. So you have one piece of action (opening and walking through a door) filmed in three separate stages, but edited together to present the audience with continuous action.

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.  

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.

Story Board

We had to story board our idea at the beginning of the task. This enabled us to stay focused on what we wanted to achieve when we got to the stage of filming. We planned out each shot and camera angle in the story board so that we knew exactly what we had to do and did not get distracted. This also helped us visualise our final product and ensure we included everything we needed to in the film. 

The first page of the story board.
It includes the initial 4 shots of the film.

The second page of the story board.
It includes the final 4 shots of the film.

We used this story board as a guideline for our film and this meant that the sequence was not an exact match. The location we were in meant that we had no access to the props we initially built in to the plan, for example a classroom desk and chairs. Instead we filmed the conversation with the two characters talking whilst sitting on a bench. The characters were also different, in the story board we portrayed them as a girl and a boy but when it came to filming the characters were two girls. The ambient sound was also different because it is not set in a classroom. Apart from these changes we managed to keep to the different camera shots and also to the timings of the shots. 

The Video

The filming went very well overall, even though we did encounter a few problems along the way. For our panning shot, when the character walks through the door and across the room, we found that the camera was very stiff and so we couldn’t pan fast enough. It also meant that the footage we collected had kinetic movement and this is not what we were aiming for, we had to film this shot many times before we were satisfied. Another aspect that we had to take into account was the background noise. We did intentionally want ambient noises from school but our camera picked up all the surrounding environment sounds. This meant we had to wait for the footsteps down the hall and the students’ chatting to die down because it would have meant different sounds would be heard after the footage had been edited. We included the three requirements for the task and we had no difficulty with the filming techniques. When we filmed we made sure that each action was filmed all the way through, with extra time left before and after so that nothing was left out and so we could make the editing easier for ourselves. 

Editing
When we were editing the footage we collected it was quite tedious because we had 7 minutes worth of film to sieve through. We wanted to make sure that we hadn’t missed anything out during the filming process and so we actually had too much footage in the end. This made the editing process a lot longer than we expected and I think we will try to keep better timing and an account of how many takes we are filming during our opening sequence process. In the end the 7 minutes of footage was compiled into, approximately, a 30 second clip. We found it hard initially to use the software we needed to edit the film but we once we had got used to it and worked out the tools we needed to use everything went smoothly from that point on. We tested out the different takes of the shots we needed and as a group decided which ones worked best. Afterwards, we were able to add some effects, such as “fading to black” at the end of the sequence. We also added transitional effects to make it more entertaining.