Preliminary Exercise

The Task 

For the preproduction of our preliminary exercise we had to create a short film with an emphasis on continuity. within this we had to include

• shot/reverse shot
• 180 degree rule 
• match on action 

Pre production

 We also wanted to make it more interesting than a simple sequence of shot/reverse shots with a single match on action. We had many ideas for our film and the idea we went for was the drug dealer style meeting, with a twist at the end.

Production of the storyboard went quite well we didn’t run into any real problems. Some of our shots were a little ambitious and weren’t included in the final film. A key example of this is in the first storyboard where we thought about having a shot tracking George whilst tilting the camera up George’s body. We tried to think forward when creating the storyboard, thinking how the shots would flow together and how we would be able to include the shot's we needed. Also when creating the storyboard we had to make sure we had enough room to do the shot, as some of our first ideas would have meant to avoid breaking the 180 degree rule we would have had a metre space to shoot in which would have limited the shot's we could take quite substantially. We made sure to include plenty of shots where we would be able to show match on action and to make the film flow together. 

we didn't need to write a script as the dialogue was minimal so was able to be included on our story board. 

here is the scanned in images of our storyboard. 

Preliminary task story board

View more presentations from Andy Wallis.

Production

During the production I directed the majority of the film. And also did some of the camerawork. For one of the production days I wasn’t able to help as I had a trip with physics. Overall I feel the production went well. We got all the shots we needed with plenty of footage to edit with. Plus I felt that all of our shots were well framed. The filming overall also went quite smoothly with a minimum of mucking about and we were able to finish the filming in about 4-5 lessons overall. When filming we made sure to never pass the 180 degree line as it would ruin the flow of the film.   

As mentioned in the pre-production post some of our shot’s had to be dropped or changed. These were because they were either to ambitious and we weren’t able to successfully pull them off. Also for some of the early shots in the film we were going to use a dolly to do a tracking shot however the surface we were using it on meant that it was far to wobbly and there was too much noise from the dolly. When combined with tilts and pans it made some of the shots incredibly difficult to achieve for rather poor results.

We normally got three good takes for each shot as this allows plenty of flexibility at the post production stage to choose the best take and also to allow for takes which on reflection aren't as good as we first thought. some of the shots we needed required the use of a long board as the dolly was too high for the shot we wanted, the shot of the feet walking along. this proved problematic as the person we were borrowing the long-board from kept forgetting so we were unable to get the shot 

Post production  

The post production went well I feel. overall our footage was to a high standard and we had enough to be able to edit easily and efficiently. We had all the shot we needed and more so that we could choose the best shot from the footage we had. we had many areas where we could show continuity with the footage as it was well filmed and was easy to edit smoothly together. this is largely due to he thought we put in during the pre production and production to do with continuity and making sure that the shot's we wanted flowed easily together without jumps and continuity errors 

 one of the key problems with this film is the audio, throughout the film there is a constant buzz. however there is very little we could do about it once we had got to the post production stage as we would have had to re-record everything or dub over the audio which would both be time consuming and dubbing over would be incredibly difficult to sync. 

another problem with the audio was also one of the shots we had, had no audio so I had to re-record that audio then dub it over. thankfully the sound is not really noticeable as being dubbed over as I used the same equipment in the same area to try to recreate the original sound as well as possible.

about half way through the film we had a couple of shots which broke the flow of the film. this was because there was too many shots in the period of time and also the editing didn't quite match up so the characters jumped around, this was fixed however when some of the shot's were lengthened and others were removed. 

towards the end of the film one of the shots is mean to fade out however after exporting it to an avi file a weird flashing effect occurred we decided to keep it in though as firstly re-exporting probably wouldn't fix the problem and also we felt that it fit with the style of the end of the film.