Evaluation of the Preliminary Task

For our preliminary task we were asked to film and edit a character opening a door, sitting down in a chair opposite another character with who he/she exchanges a couple of lines on the phone. We had to demonstrate a match on action shot, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule. We prepare for this task by making a story board and telling the character what they have to say in there little bit of dialog
The story was that there was a dodgy business deal going down and both parties had met to discuss it. Mollie and I did the filming and Annie and Dan played the characters, however we all discussed how each shot was going to be filmed also we all chose the dialog that was going to be said by Dan and Annie. The first shot was an close up of his feet where we just lay the camera on the floor and the next was a mid-shot of him just about to enter the room. We used match on action when Dan was opening the door; We demonstrated the shot/reverse shot when Dan and Annie were talking. We used a close up shot of characters face so you could see who was speaking at what time. We also used the 180 degree rule when dialogue was being exchanged so that the people viewing it will not get confused

I think that the way we edited this task shows that we are capable do do a lot in our media lessons. However there are a few things that we could improve like our filming it was very plain. Think that the overall story and other factors about the film could have been changed, for example we wanted to achieve a darkened room which we couldn’t get at the present time because of we were at school in the middle of the day. The mise-en-scene could have been improved, but we didn’t have a lot of materials so it would have been hard to improve on it in such a short amount of time. Also we should have realized beforehand that there was a computer in one of the shots that went ‘weird’ when filmed, but we didn’t know that the screen would do this at the time so there wasn’t a lot that we could of done till after we filmed and started editing.
Overall, I think as a group we work well, we all contributed in an equal amount and we were all included in the camera angles and the dialog. I feel confident about using my editing skills but I think my camera skills could be improved, because although I know how cut the films into order, I am not that confident at keeping the camera still and keep it at a constant moving pace