Preliminary Exercise

I completed the preliminary exercise with Fern Howe-Shepherd, Gabby Janes and Lawrence Kingdom, our team worked well together, but due to problems with the camera we had to re-shoot many of our shots. Despite this we managed to finish the exercise to an average standard but have learnt from our mistakes. At first it was me and Fern acting but once we saw that the filming wasnt capturing, Gabby decided she would like to act, so i directed, while Laurence filmed. 

Our camerawork was not completed to a high standard as not all the shots were steady especially when the door shuts the camera jogs and we didn’t get to re-film this as we run out of time. Also our first shot of Fern opening the door is not in focus. During the shot reverse shot the camera is too high which makes the scene off putting for the audience. The shots are also not framed correctly, as we have a lot of unnecessary space which shouldn’t have been in the frame. The eye line and 180 degree rules were followed accurately, even though the camera was positioned too high during the majority of the filming, we still managed to complete this successfully. 


Because of  the trouble with the camerawork the editing was made difficult as the material we had to edit with was challenging to make look successful. This is partly due to the fact that our shots were too short, as the six second rule was not followed and the dialogue wasn’t long enough. Therefore when we came to edit the sequence, especially the shot reverse shot we discovered that it was too fast and therefore this meant the pace wasn’t correct. We realised after we exported our preliminary exercise that there was a lot of black screen at the end, which needed to be taken off. Although we did successfully put a title at the start showing the exercise name and who is in it.

To improve our production we could change many things. for instance the camera was positioned too high, the dialogue was not clear enough, the six second rule wasnt followed and the shots were too short. To correct this, the speech should have been said louder and far more clearly, also we need to start using "camera rolling" and count to six before speaking otherwise the outcome will be unsuccessful.

In conclusion our preliminary exercise was not very successful as there are many elements that could be changed and improved if we had the time, although all team members contributed evenly to this task. If we were to do this again we would need to make sure that time was not wasted during filming, so the shots would need to be accurate first time round so if we decided we needed to re-shoot anything then we would have enough time left at the end to do this as well as edit our material successfully.