Preliminary task evaluation

The preliminary exercise involved filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue and demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule. My initial plan was to make a 30 second video which was heavily edited and had significant use of effects. It would’ve only involved one character and they would have the conversation with themselves, I would use a split screen to make that effect more significant. My script wasn’t that long and only had a couple of lines, and then again it was only 30 seconds of videos. I spent a lot of time on the storyboard and it looked a lot more detailed than it should have. I spent approximately half an hour on each drawing and I added a lot of information to the side when it was very unnecessary. The shot-list was the most helpful piece of pre planning and it guided me the most when I was filming my preliminary task. I think all three pieces of pre planning pieces are important but the storyboard is the most important as it gives the director, the writer, the actor and everyone else a clear visual of how the production should look like at the end. In my actual pre-production I will probably focus less on the detail of the storyboard and more on the script because mine was very poor for this preliminary task. My script was not detailed enough and if I work in a group, I would need to learn how to make something that all my team mates would understand. I don’t like to spend too much time on pre-planning, I prefer to just get down and to film impulsively but that doesn’t always work out too well so I do understand why pre-planning is important and I will take it more seriously for my actual coursework. The camera ran out of battery so I had to improvise and use my iPhone to film instead which means that the whole storyboard, shot-list and script was invalid and I had to think of something very quickly. I scrapped out the dialogue and I just did a walking through the door scene. I successfully demonstrated match on action and I successfully applied the 180 degree rule however shot/reverse shot was a failure for me because I didn’t have any dialogue and that couldn’t have been applied. My character did open a door, crossed a corridor instead of a room but didn’t sit in a chair opposite another character. My initial plan was to have the same character talk to themselves but I’d use a split screen effect to ensure that it doesn’t look too confusing. 

The main strength of my production was the heavy use of successful editing and the use of different effects. The cinematography was strong too and it helped the editing look better. The fast stutter edit shots sync to the music very well. The song I used was an instrumental of Justin Bieber’s I’ll Show You. I think it matched the video because it’s slow and quick and the quick parts matched the stutter edit. I also used quick flip reverse shots that also synced with the music very well.

The strongest weakness of my production and it was probably why I failed the task completely was because it was very short and didn’t exactly match the brief, I didn’t have any dialogue or conversations. I should’ve played around with the white balance on Final Cut because the whole production seemed a bit too warm and a bit boring. The immense shortage of footage was mainly due to the camera running out of battery but in my defence I would say that I did improvise very well and I did produce something sort of valid and I did well from an iPhone camera. I managed to find a way where the camera could film in 60 frames per second and that made it a lot smoother.