Completed Preliminary Task

Evaluation of our preliminary task:

Our preliminary task focused on cross-cutting, keeping to a 180 degree line, continuity, and framing. Some of these we achieved successfully however some of them need obvious work.

During filming; we managed to stay on the one side of the '180 degree' line, whenever we shot the male character he was always shown facing in one direction and the same applies to the female character, this doesn't confuse the audience by moving around the characters too much, showing them from several aspects. When we edited; we kept cross-cutting between the pair and this worked relatively well, it was clear who was speaking to whom, and when. The general continuity therefore, we think we did quite well, considering this was our first time, seriously using the editing software and filming equipment.

However;

there were moments when the editing was not effective; 7/8 seconds into the film there is a moment when there is a jump-cut in the video- this was because instead of continuing to edit, we stopped filming then started again and this broke the flow. Also; there is a zoom in of the letter, which we have now understood is a bad idea when we film because it doesn't look good, it draws attention to itself and doesn't look professional. In future, we will stop filming, set up a close up of the subject, and start filming from there, in order to avoid this again. Our frame shots were unvaried and poor too; often you could see too much of the surrounding area or not enough; the actor in the film was not always in the centre of the view. The shot angles we used were also quite primitive and plain, we couldn't really see the girl's face.

[Anna]

The program we used, iMovie HD allowed us to edit efficiently and easily. It was simple as all applications were defined and made the job of editing quick so we were able to create a movie which flowed.

Other instruments used were; a video camera and a tripod. We placed the camera on top of the tripod and from here, we were able to rotate the camera in order to achieve a variety of shot angles. Following the completion of our task, we learnt that most shots we made were not as effective as we had hoped. From this we have learned that we can vary the angle and editing for example, longer clips to gain better marks for our coursework when filming.

[Francesca]