Prelim task evaluation

Location we filmed our prelim task in the editing suite, which was assigned to us. We filmed against the white wall and the location was very useful as it had all the necessary props needed for the task e.g. door. Also another pro for the location was that there weren’t any people walking through the room. During the filming, I acted as one of 2 directors, it was my job to shout ‘action’, ‘turn over’ and ‘stand by’, making sure to leave a lead in and enough of a lead out until ‘cut’. Another way I helped out the filming, I helped thing about how to set up the shots and camera angles.

Lighting in our prelim task, we used the lights in the room, as we didn’t have any spare lights, but luckily the lighting was quite good, so we didn’t have any annoying shadows in the faces, the lighting was quite soft; the usual classroom lighting, which did help the scene as it gave it a more of an ‘inside’ feel, which is were it was set. The lighting was effective, but it did not have a great impact on the scene as it was quite soft.

Filming we set up the camera correctly and correctly focused and white balanced it, but there was one short scene of, Jo, our actress’ eyes where we forgot to focus. This meant we couldn’t use the shot for the editing of the task. Luckily we bubbled the tripod, which means adjusted the tripod so it’s level, correctly every time, so the angle isn’t off. Framing the shot gave us a bit of a problem in the close up, as our actress kept moving her head during the scene, which meant that at some points in the close up her head was halfway out of the frame, but as we redid the scene several times and adjusted the frame we finally got a good shot. In the over the shoulder shots we adjusted the angel sever times, so that the back of the room wasn’t in the room, as it wasn’t in any other shot which would have confused the audience. As we got a storyboard from our teachers before we started filming, we know just how to film the sequence as it was clearly laid out for us which hugely speeded up the filming process. During the filming we got our actress to lean against the wall, which helped us to stay on the 180 degree line. The line was kept throughout the filming of the task. In order to make sure all of our cast and crew knew what was going on we used the appropriate terminology; for example before we did anything the director shouted ‘stand by’ which told everyone to get ready, as soon as everyone is where they should be, one would then say ‘turn over’, to which the camera man would reply ‘turning over’ which means the camera is rolling, after a short  lead in the director shouted ‘action’ letting the actors know it is their time to shine. We did several shots during the task; all the necessary ones on the story board and after we were done with these, we played around with focusing from and to things, to give nice effects and we did a traveling shot of the shoes of the actor walking into the room. Another shot we tried out was the extreme close up and cut shot on the actresses face and the cubix cube.   

In general i learnt a lot about what goes on behind the camera with setting up every scene and the way you need to take several takes for one scene to work and continuity is something I had never thought about before the evaluation. fromt his task i have learnt how to use a camera, work from a story board and edit things together to give it a sense of continuity.