Group 1 AS 2015/16: Evaluation Of Preliminary Task: Morgan Noel

Evaluation of Preliminary task: Morgan Noel

For my group's preliminary task we worked on short films that had to adhere to a certain criteria in order to be able to become comfortable and familiar with continuity editing and thus qualify us into being able to follow through with our thriller opening.

First came the planning process - pre-production, in this stage we decided upon the roles each person in our group would assume, both behind camera and in front of. We also had to plan out the structure of our film and how we would incorporate each part of the criteria.

Continuity Editing is an editing technique in which the editor attempts to tweak his work so that the audience can feel as in tune and immersed with a performance as possible.

During the planning process we decided out of are group each roles, Giordano and I were to take charge of the choreography and visuals as well as camera work, and Ben and Pio were to take up the role as actors, although Ben did have input in some of the camera work, especially when we shot Pio in the establishing shots of the film.

Along with selecting each person's roles we also had limited time to construct the structure and direction of our short film. We shared ideas as to the direction we wanted to collectively go in with our film, our narrative was shaped around the criteria we had to incorporate which to a degree limited our creativity but sparked ideas concerning the direction the narrative could compliment the criteria.

The brief demanded that we include a character walking towards and opening a door, in which we must focus on the contact between the hand and the door knob, we had to incorporate a conversation consisting of two lines (at least) and 3 key techniques...

The 3 techniques included

Match on Action is when the director cuts from one shot to another view that matches the first shot's action.

Shot Reverse Shot is when one character is shown looking at another character who is usually off-screen and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character.

180 Degree Rule means that two characters should have the same left and right relationship to each other. when a camera crosses the axis connecting to two subjects it is called crossing the line, the new shot is called a reverse angle.

These 3 techniques were pivotal into adding a sense of realism in our production.

After the pre-production phase of our task we moved on to the production phase in which we carried out our filming. We filmed with a DLSR camera. During the production phase slight modifications were made to the narrative of the production as we began to get a better feel for the environment and how the content could accompany its surroundings in a realistic manor. I made a point of trying to get Pio to look slightly suspicious in the establishing shots as a means of intriguing the audience as to where this action would follow through to.

Our production was strategic as we attempted a number of different camera angles even in our establishing shots, which was originally scrapped before we went with the one we eventually decided upon as we found the second location helped the filming process to run smoother as it was closer to the main location where the majority of the filming was to take place. Unfortunately we were limited in our school location as to the variety of places we could use as a setting however we found the 6th form block satisfactory. We encountered problems in production such as outside we encountered ambient sounds which were created by the planes flying above as we tried to film, they slightly decrease the sound quality of the dialogue and can be heard in the finished work.

Once we had filmed all the footage that we required, the production phase of the task was over, it was now time to take on the post-production. For the post-production we were responsible for the task of editing and cropping the shots we had collected and putting them all together in a way in which displayed good continuity. To do this our group worked on the app 'Final Cut Pro X' on which we devised our group in half. I would be paired up with Giordano and Ben was to be with Pio. Final Cut Pro was relatively simple to use due to its clarity and layout which made it a easier task to edit under a time limit as we selected the best clips and cropped them into our finished product along with tiles, special effects and audio.

We added instrumental audios at beginning and end of the film to set the tone of each scene. The establishing scene went along with the audio we selected to heighten the intensity of our opening, thus creating a slight tension as the two characters meet, therefor giving structure to the production.

Title Screen