At the beginning of the year we were set a preliminary task within our media groups to enable us to gain practice with the cameras and to also show that we can show a technological understanding of the making of films and to demonstrate an understanding of continuity which is a fundamental principle of moving image production.
With our preliminary task in mind our group set off, camera in hand to a suitable setting in which we could show a number of technical conventions asked of us in the task:
- An establishing shot – a shot to set up the a scene’s settings or its participants.
- A close up – a shot which tightly frames a particular object/person.
- Match on action – this is the cutting from one shot to another view which matches the action and pace of the first shot which creates an impression of continuity although the shots may have been filmed at a completely different time.
- Shot reverse shot – where one character is shown looking at another character (often off-screen), and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character.
- Long shot – a shot of depth which shows both the characters and the location.
- The 180″ rule – refers to an imaginary line which cuts through the middle of the scene from side to side with respect to the camera. If the line if crossed it may cause disorientation and confusion for the viewer.
These above conventions enabled us to get a strong feeling of the things we should be doing and looking out for when we filmed our opening sequence of new fiction film. Practice makes perfect!
(Click and scroll through the above images to see descriptions.)
During the progression from this task to our full product I feel the group has learnt an outstanding amount of things. Firstly, we have learnt the importance of continuity. Due to this being the first time that we had used a camera some of the shots are a little jumpy, yet without this practice our group would not have realised the great attention continuity called for. In our final piece there is one major error of continuity and that is the shot in which ‘Lily’ walks out of her bedroom and goes to walk up the stairs. Unfortunately it proved a bit of a pain that fact that Megan King’s bathroom is downstairs…the group wanted to follow the stereotypical layout of a house with the bathroom upstairs as this would probably seem more obvious to the audience so we made it look as if ‘Lily’ was walking upstairs to the bathroom when in reality the bathroom was downstairs. Because of this if you look very closely the background and flooring of the room ‘Lily’ opens the door to walk out of is different to the room she leaves when about to walk up the stairs, purely for the reason they are completely different rooms! (and I very much accidentally forgot to close the door after me, oops) Obviously this is a bit of a nuisance, but the group felt as if it wasn’t overly noticeable (after showing it to a number of friends, none of them noticed after being asked – yay) and so there wasn’t really that much point in the hassle of redoing it. We have definitely learnt our lesson for next time though! Although this is something that could have been avoided overall I think the piece flows from one location to another well and the cuts between the scenes aren’t too abrupt or surprising. Also, this task allowed us to grasp how to use ‘Pinnacle Studio 9′ and without it I think our group may have felt as if we were thrown in at the deep end, but with a little practice we managed to work out and most importantly understand how the programme worked. Similarly, we not only learnt a number of camera angles from theory lessons but putting them to practice during the preliminary task helped us to realise what would be easy and difficult to film during the filming of our overall piece. All in all, a very helpful task!
