Preliminary Task

Planning-
For the planning our preliminary task we did a number of things to make sure we knew exactly what we were doing.
firstly we created a shooting shedual that looked like this:

Then we created a script for the characters so they know what they need to do adn say during the filming of the film, and that looked like this:

Evaluation

The task set was to create a short film showing someone walking down a corridor, using a shot-reverse shot to show them, firstly walking towards the camera, then secondly them walking away from the camera but still walking in the direction of where they’re going. Then a close-up of their hand grabbing onto and pulling down the door handle. After this there was a shot from inside the room of the person entering the room, a match on action shot showing them crossing the room and sitting at a table, then a series of over the shoulder shots of a conversation of two people, when X spoke the camera was looking over Y’s shoulder and when Y was talking the camera was over X’s shoulder. During this process we had to make sure we were observing the 180° rule to make sure the audience wouldn’t get confused at little things you wouldn’t think are noticeable, such as, what hand people are holding something in can look different depending on how it’s filmed.

For the filming of our film we used a Canon Digital Camcorder. During the filming process we went down to an empty corridor to do the filming, we took several shots of each part of the film several times, so to make sure we had as many good shots as we could get, Approximately we took about 6/7 shots of each part. The filming process was the longest part of the production of our film as we had to do numerous takes of each part of the film.

For the editing process we used adobe premier elements. In the editing process we looked through all the shots we had videoed and removed all of the ones we didn’t need, leaving us with the better shots from what we’d filmed, we then added a fade in at the start and a fade out at the end if the piece. Once the film had been put together we added a title screen and the rolling credits, we also added an extra bit of film on the end after the credits, this was of the ‘bloopers’ things that actors did during the filming, we did this to make the audience have a laugh at the end of the film.

After sorting out all of the visual editing we looked at adding sound to our film, We added a sound taken from the folder 'bedtime stories' on the school sysytem, it was a slow relaxed song to make the scene seem very relaxed and problem free. this was really difficult as we didn’t have a proper theme to our film so we couldn’t find a soundtrack to go with it easily, in the end we found one that was acceptable, we added to our film and adjusted the timing of when it starts and stops, to add extra effect to out film we added a fade in and a fade out to the music, the fade out was just before the first character spoke which gave a good effect to the film and left no silent parts, Also when we added the sound to the film, we added it to the part where she’s walking down the corridor so we took out the sound of the footsteps to add more emphasis onto the soundtrack.

During the process of producing our film I learnt a lot about film production, such as, there needs to be a minimal of 6 shots of each part so to make sure that the final piece all fits together, I also learnt how to add and take away sounds from the film during editing. Before this task I didn’t really have any experience using the adobe premier elements used for editing and I didn’t know how to use it to start with, but now I’m much more confident in using it and find it quite simple. I also learnt that even during editing it’s quite hard to make all of the filmed scenes fit together without it looking like they were filmed at different times and not all in order.

In conclusion the end product looked quite effective, however, the over the shoulder shots composition wasn’t arranged very well and were taken from a high angle, and this made it look less effective than we wanted it to. This is defiantly something I’ll remember for the production of my final short film. Also I will think more about the soundtrack to the film during the story board process to make it fit in a lot more with the sequence than what it does in out prelim because we added the sound last.