The Preliminary Task

For our preliminary task we were asked to film and edit a character, opening a door, crossing a room opposite another character and exchanging a couple of lines of dialogue, we had to demonstrate a match on action, a shot reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.

We first planned our task using a storyboard, our basic plan was a person walking down a corridor, going to open a door, coming through the door, walking across the room, talking to someone and then walking back out. By using a storyboard we were able to quickly record our preliminary task in a short period of time, this was helpful because we now know for our AS media main task, that plotting and planning is beneficial to the overall film produced.
At the start we were taught how to correctly operate the camera and how to set up the tripods. We were told about the different camera shots and that effects that they give.

Our first mistake was at the beginning as there was background sound that was not supposed to be there however when we added the audio music the unwanted sound goes more unnoticed than it would if there was no audio music, this has taught us that when filming the main task we will have to make sure that there is no unwanted sounds. To make sure that our preliminary task was going to be good we took two or three shots of each scene so that we could pick out the best bits when editing. We used a different range of camera shots including extreme close ups, to make the clip more interesting and dramatic.

We made the decision to have a thumb war between the two characters, to add humour to the clip. However we decided to a western type build up by doing extreme close ups of the two characters eyebrows to give the scene tension but also so more humour. We were taught how to use the iMac’s on an editing tutorial before we were allowed to edit our actual preliminary task this gave us knowledge of how to use the iMac’s, how to edit our work and how we could make it better by using things like titles, audios and transitions etc. Because we took two or three shots of the scenes, it was easier to edit into a clip, we will do this for our main task so that we are able to edit our clip quicker.

We realised that we should have shown a close up of the door handle to draw more attention to the match on action in the clip. We did not break the 180 degree rule and we managed to use the shot reverse shot successfully. Unfortunately the room was not lit properly so at some points during the clip it has low key lighting which made it hard to see the characters face clearly. Therefore we will make sure that we light the scenes properly when doing out main task we feel that we should have had more dialogue and spoken more clearly and loudly as it was sometimes hard to hear what the character was saying. We also feel that we could have included a shot of Alix lead on the floor at the end of the clip to show the audience the effect of what happened to him. When making our main task we will need to take all of these things into consideration to make our clip as good as it can be.
Emma Jopson and Alix Sampford