Preliminary Task- Continuity

The brief:

• A character opening a door
• Crossing a room to sit down in a char opposite another character
• They exchange a couple of lines dialogue

• Match-on-action
• Shot-reverse-shot
• 180 degree rule

Film as creatively as possible! 

For this task I worked with Kai and Samantha. All three of us agreed the canteen would be the best place to film as it was empty due to people being in class, there were doors that we could use for the match-on-action and there were chairs we could use to use for the dialogue, shot-reverse-shot and 180 degree rule. We started setting up the camera right away and decided our roles. I was to be on camera and Kai and Samantha would be acting in the scene.

The camera was set up fine by me and Samantha and I filmed the first sequence the match-on-action of Kai walking through a door. I filmed each shot a few times so we would have options when it came to editing the footage. Filming the match-on-action went well. I then thought it would be a good idea to play with the shutter speed and slow Kai down as he is walking towards his chair. We did this because it was a technique we had just learnt and wanted to try before it came to doing our short films.

Other match-on-actions we did included Kai grabbing his chair to sit down, Kai rubbing his head and him kicking Samantha off her chair. Whilst filming the conversation I stuck to the 180 degree rule and shot-reverse-shot.

Overall the filming was successful and we had no problems or technical difficulties.

When it came to editing, all was well. We had a few problems of which we overcame. This included cutting the match-on-action perfectly. When we uploaded the footage we realised that the tripod was in view of one of the shots and so were our exercise books. We should have cleared the filming area before shooting or watched the footage back critically after filming.

Sometimes Kais position had changed when doing an over the shoulder shot of Kai and Samantha in conversation. For example, in over the shoulder shot of Samantha, Kai’s hands are down but when the camera reverses its shot Kai’s hands are up. For future reference I should always make sure to tell the actors to do everything just as they did before and to memorise their exact movement.

Neither Kai nor I knew how to use Photoshop on the day Samantha was absent. This proved a problem when creating the titles.

Overall the filming was successful and we were happy with the result.