Preliminary Evaluation - Osbert Menezes

Task-

The preliminary task was to show 3 actions and 3 camera skills. We also had to show continuity editing through out the video. The following shows the tasks we used in our extract...
Actions- Sitting,

Walking,

Conversation.

Skills-Match on Action,

Shot Reverse Shot,

180 degree rule.

Pre-Production-

For this preliminary task the research and planning stage was very short. we were given only one hour to plan and record all the footage so it was very rushed and unstructured. the following shows some things we could have improved on while planning or things that went well while planning.

Genre-
One of the aspects we planned and chose before filming was the genre of the task which was a "Bond" type sequence as we found this was best to do portray the skills and actions from the task.

This is an aspect of planning that we did well.

Storyboard-

The storyboard is an import part of planning a piece in media. Its to give a basic visual idea of what the scrip is about and how it will look like on camera. It can show the position of the characters relative to the camera (camera shots) and can show their movements and the movement of the camera. It can also give an idea of what the background could look like.

Right is an example of a professional story board that shows a scene. In this story the character goes through the door and gets attacked by another character. this story board shows a screenshot of every transition of camera angle that takes place to show what it might look like when they film the scene. This can give the director and cast an idea of the characters they are playing and scenes they are playing in.

In our preliminary task we did not have time to do a professional style storyboard for our scenes but I took the time after to draw one to show what a storyboard would have looked like for our piece of media (this was a quick drawing of our scenes). This is to show an aspect we could have improved on when doing our planning by creating a storyboard for our scenes for a better understanding of what we were doing. In the storyboard the red lines show character movement and the red box shows no character movement.The blue lines show camera movements and the box shows the camera staying still.

Location- 
In terms of Location, we were mostly limited on what we could have used as we were told to only use school grounds and not enough time was given to use any location that was far way. this limited what we could have done and limited the creativity that could have gone into this task. If we could have done this again we could have given more time on location and chose a more suitable location for the script rather than basing the script around the location.

Production-

The production we had about 50 mins to film everything for the task as 10 mins from out hour was given to planning and location scouting. This ended up causing many problems.

Camera-

The camera work was mostly very well done and clean but few mistakes were made. Our first mistake was early in the extract (right) when we found that the characters walked a bit too quick for the camera pan to keep up and so cause them to be out of frame for a bit of time. this was a minor mistake but did make the shot odd.

Another mistake was when the characters split we break the idea of film making as a camera and crew can be spotted in the reflection of the window (image below). Though this was mostly cut out in the editing of the extract, a split second of it can still be seen, this broke the idea of continuity editing and could have been fixed if the tapes were reviewed at the time of filming and production.

Both these clips show how we make a few mistakes due to us not having enough time to film and review the clips and so many errors slipped through the editing. If I were to do this again I would try to make enough time to review and re-shoot the scenes to get more perfect camera work.

Sound-
There were many issues with sound in this extract as we did not have the appropriate equipment.The audio from the dialogue was recorded from a recorder app on the phone which one of the characters was holding but when reviewing these in the editing stage these files were not good and had recorded too much background noise so we went with the sound recorded from the camera. the camera sound was to quiet however and also recorded quite a bit of background but we still stuck with it.

It was a smart idea by us to overdub the sound but this failed during the production stages and was not realised until post-production so was one of the main reasons why we use the camera sound. If more time was give we could have used an overdubbed sound, recorded in a studio but this would have been too hard to apply to the lip movements of the characters.

Lighting-
Lighting was not really a problem for a us as we recorded mostly in the day and almost everything was naturally lit. Even the darker scenes were not dark enough to not see what was happening so the lighting was an overall success in this preliminary task.

Post-Production-

Editing-

Most of the success from this extract came from this stage as the editing was done quite well in my opinion. One way this is shown is through the amount we managed to do with the limited footage we had. the majority of the footage was bloopers as most of them ended up with someone laughing. We avoided this by cutting scenes before anyone laughed. However this did create a small issue in the extract as you can notice some points were someone was going to laugh so it still can be improved.

The use of the camera flash clip near the end (below) was something that was edited in using the editing program. However the original plan was to make the frame freeze after the flash to show a picture being taken but due to time issues this could not have been done. If I had more time in editing this could be improved.

Background Music-

Background music could not be put into our extract as it would have been too loud and would have meant that the dialogue would not be heard. This meant that we could not use background music. If we had recorded better sound then we could have used some background music and this could have been a place to improve.