For part of our A2 course we created a short film which had to show match on action, shot reverse shot and 180 degree rule. We also had to include a person/character walking through a door, sitting on a chair and exchanging dialogue with another character. For this my group decide to have the genre be a drama and the title ‘bruised’. We decided to choose as the only place we could shoot the film was at school.
I think our film demonstrates continuity well as the storyline is a real life situation and is not made up or hard to believe, the shots flow very well and you can always see where the characters are at all time and is very much easy to follow. The only short scene which did not flow as well as others was the flashback, but to show that it was something that had already occurred we used the ‘dream transition’.
Match on action is a technique used in film editing, is a cut that connects two different views of the same action at the same moment in the film. This was very easy for us to accomplish as we had two cameras which showed each of the characters at the same time so when editing all we had to do was the cut out the unnecessary parts.
This is an example of the match on action in our shots.
An 180 rule is a basic guideline that states that two characters in the same scene should always have the same left/right relationship to each other. If the camera passes over the imaginary axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line. This was very easy to follow as most of the time our filming occurred in the room and the two cameras didn't move and would always stay on one side.
The last editing techniques we used was shot reverse shot, shot reverse shot is where the camera switches from one character to the other to show the emotion on there face and who they are looking at, this was very easy to create as we had both views of each characters as we used two cameras so all we had to do was edit and cut out unessential parts.
I feel that our group worked very well together, we all cooperated and each helped to put ideas towards the planning, filming and editing. During the planning process we all took on rolls which were, writing the script, producing the storyboard, choosing actors and finding suitable filming locations. Doing this made it much faster to get the planning completed, after that we started the filming and got this going really quickly as each of us had separate tasks and in no time at all we were shooting the scenes. We all took in turn to film the scenes, as this was happening we were all helping each other to make sure the camera was getting all the characters in shot and what each character was meant to say. When editing we had a few sessions, so two went in to edit each time, this was very pleasant experience as we knew what we wanted the film to look like so we incorporated our ideas and worked together to finally complete the film. Overall I really liked the filming and editing and I thought we all worked really well together.
If I were to film this piece again I would have first of all made sure that my legs were not in the right hand corner of some of the scenes as they were not meant to be there and are very distracting. I would also have had someone else play the character ‘Billie’s dad as we had the same actor playing the teacher as well. I think this would have been necessary as the dad does not look convincing as he is wearing leggings and ugg boots. Another thing I would have improved on was changing the sound effects which occurred in this scene:
I thought that sound effect was very unnecessary and at the time of placing it in that scene we that that it much was lower in sound and didn't realise how distracting it was. If we were to do this again I would have taken sound out completely as it creates tension. Other than the points I have made I really don't think that there are any other things we need to improve on in our film.
I thought that we planned our video very well, we assigned tasks for each of us and after that got together to look at the storyboard, script and the actors we have chosen. We then started to think about what is going to occur in our film and we blocked out the actions and where the characters were going to be placed. I do not think that we planned our mise en scene well as in the film you can clearly see bits of paper on the table which were not purposely placed there at all. Also my leg was in the shot and in a way is a distraction and has nothing to do with the storyline. After filming we planned the IMAC editing times with our teacher which helped us to plan what we were going to do in each session in order to complete the editing and overall our film.
We used quite a lot of transitioning effects during our editing process, the first one we incorporated was a fade to black we used this just before the flashback scene and using the fade to black helped the shot to end smoothly then start the flashback. The other transition we used next was the dream transition, we used this to show the audience that this occurred in the past and was in fact a flashback from billy's memory. Using transitions in our film helps the scenes to flow well and help the audience to understand the story and not get confused or distracted.
This is the fade to black scene in our film:
This fade in black was used to transition into the flashback and make it flow well.
The most interesting thing that I have learnt from the editing software was how to extract a sound clip from one of the scenes and place it in another. This was really helpful for our group as we had a scene where ‘Billy’ was looking at the teacher in silence and we wanted to put in an appropriate sound clip and the one of him shouting “stop it” sounded relevant. We did this by muting the audio that was playing when ‘Billy’ was looking at the teacher then extracted and duplicated the flashback audio and shortened It down and placed it in the appropriate scene.
What I have learnt about technologies throughout the process of constructing this film is that without the cameras, editing software, tracking and dolly’s the filming would not have been possible at all and there would not have been a film. I have learnt that having the editing software helps the shots that we filmed to flow well, shorten them down and fit in together to make the film complete. I have also learnt without the editing software we would not be able to duplicate audio and place it somewhere else, you would not be able to add transitions which could make the film confusing and also without the music at the end and start credits it would be very dull and lifeless.
In conclusion I have learnt from the preliminary tasks how many factors you need to think about before you film, e.g. storyboard, script, storyline and actors. I have also understood how the editing process works and how to do it myself and how to work I-MOVIE. I have also learnt from my mistakes and in future know what to do and what not to do. Overall I have really enjoyed my preliminary task.
