Evaluation - Question 7

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

Our brief in the preliminary task was to create a continuity based clip that was made up of match on action, 180-degree line and shot/reverse shot. We created a situation in which a person was to walk up to and enter a room. Upon entering they were to cross the room and sit down in a chair. They then had to engage in conversation with an opposing character for a short length of dialog. The person was then to cross back over the room again and leave. This seemed like an easy enough task but when it take to filming, we didn't particularly struggle but it was more difficult than we originally perceived it to be. The thing that we found quite hard was match on action. We found this to be quite difficult at first because it was hard to film the shot a few times exactly the same to make sure that the transition between shots flowed into each other. It took us a few takes to get this shot right:

It was quite difficult to get this shot shown to the left of Annie actually entering the room and then matching it up with the shot underneath this to make it look like she flows.
To make sure that the continuity was clear with these shots we filmed them both a few times and picked which one actually matched up to each other.




Whilst filming the preliminary exercise it wasn't completely apparent that these elements were actually a dire part of the clip, not just to making the shot smooth in regards to continuity but also to make sense in regards to context. 
For example when we filmed the over the shoulder shot shot/reverse shot on the preliminary task it was in our first thoughts that we just needed the shoulder of the person being spoken to in the bottom corner of the shot. Although when we filmed our main task we realised that there is a lot more depth to the meaning of even the angle and positioning of not just the person in main focus but also the person who's shoulder we were shooting over in the shot/reverse shot.
Our main task was to create an opening and the titles to a film lasting at least 2 minutes. 

We found out that we also needed to incorporate the 180-degree line when filming the shot/reverse shot. We needed to make sure that the 180-degree line was correct because if it wasn't then the line of focus would be out and it might actually confuse the audience as you aren't sure what the main character in focus is looking at.
We used this tip when producing our main task especially because this film would have a lot more context and it is set to a genre then we would need to make sure that there is no confusion over what it is that going on in the film during the conversation. 

The first image is one of the over the 
shoulder shots from our preliminary exercises:

This is the first over the shoulder shot that we filmed in our preliminary exercise. After figuring that the heads in the correct positions because if not it loses the continuity and doesn't look right. So we decided that we needed to film shot a few times so when it came to editing we could pick a shot that looks the way we wanted it to and also makes sense. We also discussed that as there was a difference in height between the 2 characters then we needed to consider that it may look as if one character is more in power than the other when we are filming, which is what we wanted to avoid in the preliminary task and also the final project.



This next image is the first over the shoulder
conversation shot from our final project.
Because again of the height difference we considered the things that we had learnt from the preliminary task. We learnt that we should higher the actual tripod that the camera is on and make sure that we didn't actual tip the camera in any angle to get Saul on the shot because this may have indicated a certain character being in power which isn't what we wanted to do as we wanted a mutual power at this point.