Preliminary Evaluation - Kyle Quadra

The Brief

Preliminary Exercise - Continuity exercise.

The Preliminary Exercise requires students to produce a piece of film in which a character; opens a door, walk across a room, sits down in a chair opposite another character.

Main Task - Titles and opening sequence of a new fiction film.

Technology - Digital video, non-linear editing. 

Theoretical Understanding - the language of film and grammar of the edit, making meaning through moving images, narrative and representation, action and enigma, plot and story, establishing realism and verisimilitude, miss en scene, genre of interpretation.

Actions to Include

Sitting

Walking

Converstation 

Skills

Match on Action

Shot Reverse-Shot

180 Degree Rule

Pre-Production

Story Planning

As we were restrained by time, the research and planning for the task was unstructured and basic. In terms of story boarding, we as a group discussed verbally what we were going to do i.e location for filming, a short narrative, props if necessary. 

We had come to the decision that we were going to follow the Thriller Spy film genre and had discussed a simple narrative, that would be possible to cover within a one to two minute sequence which would include the required key technical areas and actions, as well as deciding what characters should feature in the story and where we would film it.

On the way to the location we briefly sketched out a story board which included the scenes we wanted to capture and how we would capture them while observing the 180 degree rule; that refers to an imaginary line which cuts through the centre of the scene. Crossing this line changes the audience's perspective on the scene which may cause disorientation and confusion, therefore doing this must be avoided.

Location

Being restricted to only the school grounds greatly limited our creativity in terms of finding a setting to creates scenes which complimented our genre. Yet we found the most suitable locations available which would fit into our short narrative. 

Reflection of the Pre-Production Stage

Overall as a team, we knew what we wanted to achieve in the planning stage; to come up with a simple narrative, decide on filming locations and look into how we were going to fit all the key technical areas and actions into the piece of film.

We could improve this in the future by taking more time to develop ideas, draw up detailed story boards with stage directions, camera directions and a script if there is a need for one. This would improve our poor structure and the quality of our final work.

Production

Camera

Setting up the camera on set was not difficult. We had mentally mapped out the scene and discussed where the camera should be placed previously during the Pre-Production stage. Once we got to filming, as we had not properly rehearsed - there were many outtakes. We also had an issue which we found after filming, that the camera does not pan fast enough to keep the characters in frame therefore making the walking sequence seem out of sync and sort of unplanned. Being limited for time meant that we couldn't film multiple takes and therefore couldn't correct this error.

Sound

It was our original plan to record the sound separately to the film footage, this being done on a voice recorder on our phones. This meant that we did not need speak louder for the camera's microphone to pick up the sound, but due to poor organisation and time restraints we couldn't fit it in to match the footage and abandoned that idea.
Another issue was overpassing planes due to the airport nearby. We had approximately half a minute to film a take before the next plane would fly over causing a loud and overpowering rumble making it hard for the audience to hear the characters speech.

Lighting 

In terms of lighting, due to a lack of time it was difficult to plan out how the lighting would effect the scenes. Therefore we resorted to filming majority of the film outside in the natural light. There was no issue as we filmed during the day with reasonably sunny weather. In scenes that took place inside, lighting there too was not an issue due to them being naturally well lit by large windows. The shadows created indoors complimented the mysterious effect created by a hooded, dark character. Hence making this a successful area of the Production stage. 

Reflection of the Production Stage

Improvements to this section would include taking more time to film more takes. Review footage after filming so errors can corrected without having to return to the location later, which is time consuming, and being more organised specifically with the sound files.

Post-Production

Editing and Sound

We divided into pairs were all of us had the same original raw footage. At this stage we pulled together all the footage and skimmed through it to find the best takes to include in the final piece of film. We were limited on the footage as we did not film many takes of each scene.
Once we had the footage we wanted to use, we watched though them closely so that we can link the different shots together seamlessly. This can be seen when the camera switches angle, and the characters are where you would expect them to be, instead of being ahead or behind the place were you saw them before the cut. This adds to the continuity factor.

The sound was not to the standard that we had wanted and as the separately recorded sound would take too long to sort out, we decided to overlay a soundtrack to mask the poor sound and background noise of the ambience outside.
We cut the sound off where there was an important part which would explain the plot, but as the raw sound was poor this is still difficult to hear.

We added effects to the film such as a camera flash as one of the agents enters a building along with the non-diegetic sound of a camera flashing to go along with it.

Reflection of the Post-Production Stage

Overall, this section was successful, as we produced a piece of film which included the key technical areas and actions to a reasonable standard. 

The only way that would improve this section would be to improve the Pre-Production and Production sections by planning our work out in detail.