Audience Response to our Preliminary exercise

In our lesson on Friday, as a class we all watched eachothers Prelim exercises and gave our responses to them.

The feedback that we gained from the class was that there wasn't much continuity as we missed out a shot because we should of filmed Charlotte sitting down on the chair after she entered the room. As we were filming this we did realise and tried to fix it by putting an extra shot of Sarah's suprised face in but we really needed the shot of Charlotte sitting down to make it look more realistic and keep the continuity.

This feedback from the audience response has helped us because it has taught us to be more careful about our filming and make sure we have every shot we need before sitting down to edit. It means we will make sure our storyboard is perfect and includes every shot we need before we start filming for anything else, especially our 2 minute film opening coursework task.

Completed preliminary exercise

This is our final preliminary exercise after we edited it. From this we learnt the importance of the 180° rule, how to shoot various camera angles and how to direct actors in a short film.

Our script:
Charlotte: (Walks past door of room outside and cannot be seen, reappears in the middle of the door from below looks at Sarah angrily through window of door)
Sarah: (Looks shocked/scared as of seeing Charlotte)
Charlotte: (Storms into room and sits down opposite Sarah) Wanna be startin' somethin'?
Sarah: You've got to be startin' somethin'!
Charlotte: Wanna be startin' somethin'?
Sarah: You've got to be startin' somethin'!
Charlotte: Your too high to get over..?
Sarah: Yeah, yeah..
Charlotte: Your too low to get under..?
Sarah: Yeah, yeah..
Charlotte: Your stuck in the middle..?
Sarah: And the pain is thunda'!

And this is one slide from our original storyboard which we used to help film and edit our preliminary task. Once we started fliming we made minor changes to our storyboard as we came up with better ideas but this was one that we stuck to.

Our preliminary task

In last Wednesday's lesson we discussed the preliminary task that we had to complete and within our groups made a storyboard to fit our own. The preliminary task is a simple 30 second film that must include two actors having a conversation. One must walk through a door and sit at a table where the other actor is already sitting and exchange a few lines of dialogue. The main focus of the preliminary task is to show that we understand the 180° rule. We watched past years preliminary tasks and then our group decided to use song lyrics rather than a made up conversation as we thought this would be easier. Sarah and Charlotte were the two actors in our task and decided on the song "Got to be starting something" by Michael Jackson. Myself and Molly were directing and filming the task and so thought about the camera shots we wanted to use.

In Friday's lesson we were the first group to shoot our preliminary task. As we started shooting we started to make changes to our original story board as we had newer better ideas and we ended up with 5 different shots all using the 180° rule. Overall it took 17 takes to get them perfect but we ended up with one two shot, two over the shoulder shots from different angles, a long shot of Charlotte walking through the door and one close up shot of Sarahs face. The filming of our task took longer than I thought and I did not think we would have had to do so many takes but I enjoyed the lesson and look forward to editing our task and putting it all together.