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Monday 18 October 2010

continuity film.

For our first assignment we were set the task of making a short film to show we can create continuity in a film. To do this we had to plan the film very well, then the production stage ie the filming, and finaly the post production stage.


In the pre production stage we worked out the plan of the production. To do this we drew out a storyboard in which we drew different shots and analysed the camera angles, close up shots, etc. The conversation scenes had to be carefully planned as we had to use shot/reverse shots to produce a convincing conversation, and by using this shot method we had to abide by the 180 degree rule which stops the audience getting confused. we had to plan different equipment to use, we decided on a tripod for stability in the shots, a dolly for a moving shot to create a better stability than holding the camera amd a clearer shot.


In the production stage we started filming, we got to grips with the equipment by doing a series of rehersals, after this we started to film the propper production. our first shot was a slow zoom shot and started as a long shot and finished as an extreme close up with a medium close up and a close up and a medium shot in between. after this shot we did a moving shot with the dolly, we needed to pan the camera at this point to turn round a corner which made the filming of this scene perticularely difficult. The next scene involed another extreme close up and then we tilted the camera to show an over shoulder shot to a hand opening the door and then the tilt shows the other character in the window. This lead to the conversation scene in which we needed the shot reverse shot, we used the 180 degree rule to make sure the audience wasnot confused, in this scene it was very difficult to get a good camera position as one of the characters was in the far corner of the room and this made it hard to get a good position for the camera. After this we did a match on action shot of a girl receiving a text message to her phone, the we cut and filmed an extreme close up of the text message, this was difficult to do as it was quite hard to focus on the text message. after this we had another match on action which was very difficult to film, the scen was a boy jumping off a balcony and landing on a girl and crushing her, as obviously we could not actually film a boy killing himself and another person as we would only have one chance to film it and for health and safety reasons, we had to do another match on action shot, so we filmed him about to jumop off and then cut and filmed the end product of the jump which was him laying ontop of her with them both dead.

After we had filmed the production we had to do the post production, this is the editing stage of the process. In the post production we discored a major problem which would hinder us hugely in the capuring stage, as we had been looking back through what we had filmed and we did not rewind back to where we had left it so we had large chunks of time without any film which made it difficult to capture. The capturing of the film went quite well after we had sorted out this problem and we were then onto the edditing stage of the post production, at this point we were putting all the peices together, we had to cut the parts that we didnt need and then paste the other parts together. We had to do a series of montages to get the match on action scenes to flow smoothly and in the suicide scene we cut into a black screen whilst the audio of screeming and a laning were going on and then cut to the shot of the two lying dead on the floor The editing stage was not easy at all, we found problmes with the editing software although it was probably just us making mistakes, this meant that the smoothness of the changing of scenes wasnt as good as we would ahve liked it to be, and the overall quality wasn't as good as it could of been, after a bit of practice i think we will be able to use the software a lot better and the products will be a lot smoother and more successful.