In this preliminary task, we all feel that we have successfully filled the brief that was given to us. This is due to the fact we completed all of the steps from filming someone walking to a door to filming dialogue including using the 180 degree rule, tracking shot and shot-reverse-shot (S/RS). However, now that we have viewed the finished edited product we have seen some errors which went unnoticed at that time of filming. We now see room for improvement in areas such as lighting and framing. As there was four of us working together we had to decide roles for everyone to ensure we all contributed, we had one cameraman, two actors and the final member directed. We feel that as a group we worked very well together.
Chelsea was the actor who walked to the door as Shamaila, the cameraman, filmed this opening shot as an over the shoulder tracking shot; this means the camera was in motion similarly to the actor. We feel worked well as the motion was compatible. We next filmed the close up of the hand on the door handle opening the door, the camera was steady whilst the close up was being filmed. The cameraman then changed position and filmed the opening of the door from inside of the room, this is known as a match on action. The problem with this section of the film was that the lighting quickly changed from a bright area to a dark corner Chelsea was passing then to another day lit area. Chelsea was also wearing a dark t-shirt at the time so it was difficult to see her as the lighting changed. On entering the room, the first actor walked to a chair and sat down across from a second actor (Lewis) and they then held a short conversation. When filming the conversation we uses the shot-reverse-shot to good measure and also ensured we kept to the 180 degree rule. The main strong points while filming this particular sequence is that we included over the shoulder shots and the camera was held steady. We were pleased with this out come as we did not use a tripod. The main problem with this part of the filming is that the framing was quite poor, this is because on some of the shots there is not enough or too little space around the actor. The problem with having too much space is that is can draw the audiences’ attention from the conversation but too little means that a part of the persons head is cut off from the shot. To fix this is the future we could change the camera angle to ensure a better quality shot. Another problem that we encountered during editing was that the frame was shrunk from original size. This cut a small amount of the edges and affected the look of the film. It was easily seen that the top of the actors heads is now gone. We tried to improve this during editing, it slightly improved but it is fair to say we were actually unsuccessful at returning it to the original size shot.
Sound quality and speed of speech was also low quality. The sound varied due to camera problems and editing. The camera was cheap and not of a very good quality which, we found, affected the sound quality. In editing we attempted to fix this problem however this made one of the actors voices seem louder than the other. Also, the speech seems rushed, although it is supposed to be a short conversation it was not aimed to be a quick conversation. We now feel this could easily be solved by returning to editing and leaving just an extra second or two at the end of each actors speech as it would allow a slight delay of thinking time and the speech would seem more realistic at a slower pace.
In conclusion, we feel we started off well, shots, angles and lighting were good. But we were not consistent with these factors throughout filming which led to a decrease of quality. Lighting was not a factor we took into consideration before or during the filming. In future we plan to ensure the surrounding lighting is more consistent. We feel that our first two shots were our better shots during this task. Now that we have discussed and explained how to improve the weak points for the future, we feel that our final project will be an improvement on our preliminary task. We did fulfil the brief, filming the correct steps but not to the best of our ability.
