Preliminary Task Evaluation

Our preliminary task was to create a short film introduction. We had to film the back of somebody entering a room and then sitting down with one other person. We also had to include 2 lines of dialogue for each person to say.
Our film showed a member of our group entering a room through a door, but only showing the back of the head which denoted the mystery of the film. We also filmed a hand on a door handle which showed the entrance as being slightly sinister and the dialogue we chose didn’t give too much away about the film as we left the last line as if it were a cliff-hanger.
The planning was important in this task as we had to decide on characters, the setting, dialogue, and the genre we wanted to aim for. We wanted to do something that was a bit dark and mysterious, so that the audience is left wondering what’s going on.
Also in our planning we used storyboards to create the order of our shots, we drew the first one by hand and did the second one by taking single shots from a phone and uploading them on to a computer. We included how we were going to do each shot and noted which ones we were using, for example when Charlie and Sara are speaking to one another we used a ‘shot reverse shot’. Also we used a panning shot as we filmed Charlie’s feet walk across the room, by not showing the face this gave the audience a build-up of suspense. A match on action shot worked well as Charlie started walking up to the door in the first few shots, putting her hand on the door handle and then walking through the door which we showed from Sara’s point of view.
The storyboards were handy as we could refer to them when filming so that we were getting the shots as we had first planned them; this also prevented them from not matching up to any original plan.
Our film turned out well and we managed to it in good time.
Our biggest problem was the music in the background next to the room we were filming in as our shots didn’t then match up because of different sounds.
The editing was quite complex but we managed to make it look smoother by doing so. When filming we recorded some shots more than once, either because we had done the first one wrong or because we wanted to choose between a few shots when watching it through on a bigger screen to see how it would look. When completing the editing we uploaded the final piece onto You Tube ready to watch from start to finish.