Preliminary Exercise

Our task was to produce a short film that had to include a match on action shot and dialogue. The story line was our choice; also the location was our choice too. Our group consisted of me, Josh savage, George Russell, and Charlotte Kendall.

Pre-Production Preliminary

To prepare for our production we created a story board that gave us a guideline of the basic shots that we wanted to include and the where about of the actors performing. We used this story board to set out each clip. The story board was changed and edited depending on changes to the environment.  

Within our storyboard we had to plan out our conversation and how it was going to work. we used a shot/ reverse shot and had to be careful that when we started filming we made sure that eye levels were accurate to maintain continuity.

 To understand what shots would work we researched into different shots and angles, a helpful website was http://www.mediacollege.com/video/shots/ which gave us clear examples and pictures of the camera shots and what they look like. A particular hurdle that we had to overcome was the fact that we had so much freedom to choose what the theme was going to be etc. However once this was sorted, we were able to get on with finding a location that would remain free every week when we wanted to film.

 Production Process

Our production process began with finding our location, originally we started in one area of the school, but soon found that there were too many delays due to other students walking around the school, and classrooms that we used would not be free when we needed them the following week. By then we had already started filming a sufficient amount of our project. This meant that when we found a new classroom and area we had to start a fresh.  However this worked to our advantage as it gave us a chance for some rehearsal time, also the actor originally playing the part (Charlotte) was ill so to avoid wasting time i was used in her place so we could have a run through of the different shots and angles. This delayed our process so we ended up being slightly behind other groups, and when it came to editing we had more footage to look through from the filming that we had started in our original location. The shots we did varied from match on action to shot/reverse shot. This created a wide range There was 2 people filming and the other 2 were participating in the acting.

During our production we use a mobile phone in order to show one of the characters receive a text message, while filming this the connections from the text message being sent came through the sound being picked up by the microphone, this was something that had to be edited out as the filming worked well and we didn’t want to sacrifice the film due to the sound.

Post Production

Our editing was quite hard due to technical difficulties, this was down to our computer being very slow, and constantly freezing, which meant some of our capturing wasn’t completely uploaded onto the computer. This was unfortunate, However gradually we were able to capture all our clips and edit them so we got the parts that we needed, this process is probably one of the longest as it means constantly looking and going back on what you have just done. (trial and improvement) also during editing we found that some clips were being deleted and cut really quickly which made the flow of our film very jumpy.

We had to cut and paste parts of our clips in order to get rid of the bits we didn’t want. One problem that we found during this was we had cut too soon after each section which made it more difficult for us to edit the actual clips. If we were to film again then we would make sure we allowed 5 second before and after each shot to ensure that we had enough time during editing to cut bits we didn’t want.