Preliminary Task

Aim: Film and edit a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple lines of dialogue. The task should demonstrate match on action, shot reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.

For our preliminary task we had to create a short film. In this film we had to prove that we could include continuity editing, match on action, 180 degree rule and dialogue. We started by creating a story board showing exactly what we would show, the camera angles, shot time and what would happen in that shot. We had to carefully plan out exactly what would be in the shot, the shot size and the lighting. Storyboards helped us carefully plan our shots and when it came to filming we looked back at our storyboard and we all knew exactly what to do, the props needed, lighting and mise-en-scene.

In one lesson our teacher allowed us to view and make comments about the previous year 13 preliminary tasks. We learnt a lot from watching them and took notes when watching. Our notes had good points and bad points. The good points include the humorous aspects and the almost perfect cuts and flowing film. Although some dragged out too long with jump shots and the continuity did not flow easily enough. We took some notes on points we have learnt from them and they included the editing of our filming. We need to ensure that our shots make sense and flow well enough.

We all put ideas forward for the storyboard and combined all our idea to come up with our final decision, which was to record a short film which consisted of Roberta Leary and Maria Rostkowska acting out a series of short scenes. Georgia Day and Maria Rostkowska recorded the scenes and decided on the final angles of the shots. We decided to shoot part of our preliminary task in the school corridor. We picked this area because the mise-en-scene was plain therefore all the attention was on our main characters. We only included a small amount of dialogue as we did not want our film to ‘drag out’ and we did not want to bore our viewers. We are very satisfied with what we have completed so far. However there is still a lot more to do such as editing.

The production of our preliminary was fairly quick. We adapted to the filming almost straight away as it was easy to use. However we did come across some problems. In one particular shot we panned the camera across the room to follow the person inside, but the camera was stiff and jolted which has made the quality of the shot almost too bad to use. If we had a chance we would have filmed the shot over, but unfortunately we ran out of our allotted time.

The preliminary task gave us an insight on the filming side of the task. We now know how to create an effective storyboard and how to deal with the time allowance. We can now overcome our mistakes and move forward in the production of our thriller task. The actual shooting of the task was quicker than we first expected, but if we had a second chance we would have taken more time to make each shot even better. By taking a longer amount of time we could have planned precisely where we would film the shots and the props. The storyboard contributed effectively to the planning.

During the editing process we encountered very few problems one of which was erasing jump cuts. When filming we did not think about how untidy they would make our short film look, this dragged out our editing production time.
Now we have had experience in the editing process when it comes to the main task the editing will take less time and we can improve due to this experience. Filming and editing the preliminary was a very useful process as this has given us enough experience to produce a good main task.
People have found our task easy to follow and understand and also that it flows well.
The preliminary task matches our story board exactly, this proves that our short film turned out precisely as we expected.
Our preliminary task was great experience and gave us an insight into the world of filming.

By Roberta Leary and Georgia Day and Maria Rostkowska