Preliminary Task Evaluation

Hi!

Creating this task was enjoyable and fun to make. Although we did have fun there were some downs to our task, however there were many strengths also: 

I think our main strength is teamwork and working as a group. We all had our own jobs and we all knew what we had to do. Because we are all friends and good friends, we all think in a similar way therefore when someone came up with an idea, someone else would add onto that idea and improve it. When thinking about what we would do as a group we all had the same idea. This means that we all had the same vision and goal for the task and what it would look like. As we had all these connecting ideas we also managed to use different shot types. We have included Shot Reverse Shot, 180 Degree Rule and Over the Shoulder shots, all used to effect. We used the Shot Reverse Shot along with 180 Degree Rule for the conversation in our final piece between Jack and Matt. These shot types and ideas happened because we worked as a team.

Another one of our main strengths on this task was that when creating the task, we did it in a professional manner and got the filming finished in one day or lesson. This doesn’t mean that the quality isn’t there and that the task was rushed. We were just quick and professional with our work. If someone was off task, another would tell them to stay focussed. If someone made a mistake when filming we could just get on with it and not dwell. Despite us being close friends and therefore have a tendency to go off topic and talk about irrelevant subjects, we remained focused, which is why it didn’t take long to film.

Our main weakness on this task I think was that we when filming and using the shot types we didn’t check them over once filmed and were so concentrated on the dialogue. We therefore broke the 180 degree rule once and also broke the continuum of the film. This means that the scene wasn’t the same all the way through when changing shots. For example Matt had his hands up when Jack was pointing the gun at him, but when we cut to the next angle he had his hands down. Furthermore, we couldn’t change or film the scene as we had left it too late and we only noticed once the task was made and had been edited. This leads onto our second weakness as a team. Planning;  

The other weakness of our preliminary task was the thought process in the planning. Although most of the planning went well, however with the braking of the rules and not leaving ourselves enough time not change and fix it was a huge downfall on our behalves. Also when filming we did not realise how much the environmental noises would effect this, with lessons going on down the same corridor we were filming in. When recording in some clips you could hear students in the background. Luckily with the editing we were able to mask over the noise with the music we used.

Overall, our preliminary task wasn’t a complete fail as we did make a piece which as a group we are happy with. Also, these mistakes we made will teach us and make us learn from them so we can improve for the future. This will give us an advantage as we will know what to do and what not to do when doing our opening movie scene. 

See you soon!

Evaluation of the Final Film

Hi!

This is our evaluation of the final film that we have created including an evaluation of the preliminary task. It contains detailed analysis of everything we did with possible improvements as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxVKKR4K4d0 

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First Filming Day

Hi!

After the Christmas break we decided that we’d take a day off of school in January to film the entirety of our opening of an action film. Although we got a lot of shots recorded that day, most of which we used in our actual final film, we made a few mistakes which led to us having to re film using a second film day. During this first filming day, we had both strengths and weaknesses to our filming and choice of shots etc.

Strengths:

·     Amount of shots: Overall on this day we managed to film all of the film and we ultimately used around ¾ of the shots that we recorded. Seeing as this was the first time any of us had created a short film/film opening we handled the occasion reasonably well. Even with the lack of planning that we carried out we were able to come up with good shots that were innovative and that fitted in really well when combined with the music and other shots that we used.

·         Behind the scenes footage: one of the main things that we wanted to do throughout the filming day was to film ourselves discussing what we wanted to do with shots and how we wanted to enhance the quality of each scene. As a result of this we managed to record good behind the scenes footage that we could use later in our evaluation.

Weaknesses:

·        Location: The location that we chose for our final scene in which Matt finally takes revenge on Conor and Jack was filmed in what was deemed a too public area. We had to dismiss the shots we had taken here because the police said that it would cause concern for onlookers and other members of the public. This meant that even if we thought we had finished shooting entirely we would have to at least re film those final shots.

·    The Gun: Jack unfortunately broke the gun that we had been planning to use right at the start of filming. We were unable to fix it with super glue and we all decided that it’d be fine to just use tape to mend it temporarily. However when we reviewed the shots that we’d used the gun for, we realised two things. Firstly the gun wasn’t exactly the right type for our modern day action movie and therefore we needed something more up to date. As well as this the tape had done nothing to improve the look of the gun and although not everyone noticed its broken parts we for sure did and thought we needed to re shoot the scenes that we had used it for.

·      Time management: although we managed to get all of the shots we wanted, we did have the whole day to film and we got distracted a lot. Our distraction led to our final scene being poorly shot in terms of lighting. Therefore we had to reschedule in order to re shoot those poor quality shots.

Overall the first filming day went reasonably well because of the fact it was poorly planned and we were making a film of this importance for the first time. Although we did have more weaknesses than strengths and this was probably down to the fact we were all novices in the film making department. Luckily we were able to review our failures in the first filming day and then correct them in the second filming day. 

See you soon!

'The Mugging' - Demonstrating the Match on Action and the 180 degree rule

Hi!

Here is a short film that we created at the start of the year. The purpose of this was to create a film demonstrating and applying all the shot techniques/rules we had recently learnt, including shot reverse shot, the 180 degree rule and basic match on action, match on action being the continuity of the editing and smoothness between shots, where one shot cuts to the next shot whilst still showing the position of the subject from the first shot. Most of the of the techniques in this video we took on to use in our final opening credits film.

My evaluation of ‘The Mugging’.

Our task was to create a short film with many different camera angles in it as possible to try and make the film flow naturally. Of course, this was difficult at first but when we remembered the rules and action lines, we are able to create a short film that was easy to interpret as a viewer. Eliot made some good decisions on how we should film it as he was the director. Anything we said, Eliot had an input on it. For example, I made a mistake about suggesting a type of camera shot but as Elliot rightly corrected me, it would have broken the 180 degree rule.

We found filming difficult because we couldn’t stop laughing and what should have taken us around 15 minutes ending up taking us about a whole hour. Next time, we’ll try to not laugh as much to get the work done in as shorter time possible so we could work on improvements because we didn’t have time to do it. That would be why some shots are blurry because the camera wasn’t in focus. So if we allowed ourselves more time to look over the film, we could have had a higher grade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR6-MU-zCzI

See you soon!