Evaluation Question 7

Preliminary Task Brief:

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.

Main Task Brief:
The titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes. All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source.

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Creating the preliminary sequence was all about continuity and it was harder than I expected, which taught me to be extra careful when filming for the full product. This helped the narrative make sense and although there were still a few continuity errors, no-one noticed any of them in our screenings as they were minor.



An example of one continuity error we faced



I learnt the importance of a master shot and how it can be cut into and out of several times throughout a sequence to make it clearer to the audience the positioning of all the characters and to set the scene:

Master/Establishing Shot

The prelim task also taught me not to underestimate how long filming can take and to use time properly, as the very simple, short preliminary task took a lot longer than I expected to film, giving me a rough idea of how long our film opening would take. One of the most valuable continuity techniques I learnt whilst creating the prelim task is the 180 degree rule, something I didn’t previously know about.

Whilst selecting footage to use for our prelim task, we noticed that certain shots just didn’t look right together because we had moved over 180 degrees from one shot to the next. This was a good mistake to get out of the way and I made sure not to do the same when filming our opening sequence, in particular during the stairs scene. 

As I filmed most of the prelim task, I found that the actors subconsciously moved positions slightly between shots, so whilst directing the main task I made sure to tell our actors to stay as still as possible between shots as to not make the cuts look jumpy.



A basic continuity error in the Prelim Task



Another thing we had to do during our prelim task was a location reccie and walkthrough. This was simple enough as we were just using a classroom at school, but even this posed problems as we could hear the other groups talking through our headphones and we had to share a corridor. It taught us not to just assume we will be able to shoot wherever and whenever we want, and made us more thorough when deciding on locations and testing out sequences for our film opening shoot.
This helped us when planning our second shoot for our main task as we did a walkthrough of the extra footage we intended to film at school to flag up any possible problems and to help us decide the shot types for our storyboard: