Main Task 'The Witness'

Main Task 'The Witness'

Preliminary Task 'You're in my seat'

Wednesday 20 October 2010

Prelim Evaluation





1.My group 2C was smaller than the others, it consisted of Jess Wilson, Phillipa Dodi and myself.

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Despite our small group size I believe we have been very successful in creating the prelim sequence which was required from the brief.

2. First of all we arranged a planning meeting and brainstormed ideas before settling on the narrative of someone being in someone’s seat. We then allocated different tasks but helped each other with all of them for example first I wrote the script where as Phillipa then drew the storyboard (shown below).
Phillipa Walking Along the Corridor

Below is a visual representation of camera shots in a sequence that join together to build a narrative flow. This particularly useful as if provides everyone from the director to actors exactly whats going on in the shot. Below the pictures are short captions detailing specifics such as action, camera angle and directions as well as lighting. One key reason why storyboarding is essential is because it allows the director to see whether his ideas are going to work on screen and another is so that he can decide the sequences of all shots. Most importantly the storyboard illustrates how the narrative will flow from shot to shot.














We then all helped to create a shot sequence so that we knew what order to film the shots in, this was important as we had a time limit and if this was a real film time is money.
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We have been studying many theories so far during our course, however the one which we were trying to take into account was continuity theory. The are 3 parts of this theory that we included, the first of which was the 180 degree rule this keeps the viewer on one side of the action making sure they do not get confused. We used shot reverse shot as well to show convocation progression in a continual way. The final one is match on action, I feel we were especially successful with this one as we perfectly change between shots keeping the action flowing. Another theory we took into account was Toderovs theory of Equilibrium, this is theory is about a disruption that drives the story along and can me applied to ours. The boy sits happy in the classroom and the disequilibrium is the girl storming in and shouting at him.


3. As this was only a preliminary task and the main target was to achieve continuity the amount of technology we used was very limited. In production we used a video camera, tripod, clapper board, a microphone and headphones. Headphones are important as a camera picks up sound differently to our ears so wearing them tells us exactly what the shot sounds like.
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While editing we used an editing program called adobe premier pro Photobucket

4. When planning we had to think about what locations were available to us, travelling outside of our media block could lead to unwanted noise during changing lessons or people walking in the background of our shots. We planned to film inside in case it was to rain and didn’t want to move to far away because of our time limit. When shooting we had to make sure that the clock was not in shot as obviously this would have confused the viewer, another factor was our use of props. Our sequence involved the movement of props so it was essential to make sure they were in exactly the same place to achieve continuity.
5. I would say our sequence is successful however, there are a lot of things we can take away and learn from it. For example, the sound levels change for a few seconds during the pan, this disrupts the flow of out sequence and if there was a re-shoot we would be sure to fix this. Further more there were some deleted shots that didn’t quite work as we wanted, for example in one shot a reflection could be seen on the window, where as in another shot we didn’t quite achieve continuity, because of this we did not include it in the final edit. If done again we would take more shots to make sure we get the desired shot perfect so it fits our sequence.
6. One thing I have learn is that continuity is a lot harder to achieve then I first thought however with careful planning and organisation it is possible. I have learn that lighting is important as it can cause unwanted effects such as shadows and reflections and will defiantly

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