Preliminary Task

In this task we have been asked to plan, film and edit a piece of footage recorded ourselves. The storyboard below is showing the scene in which a person walks through the door, goes and sits next to another person and exchanges a few lines of dialogue. I have tried to make good use of a few filming and continuity editing techniques that are used when filming much larger productions and these include: 

- 180 degree rule is a filming guideline that the characters in a scene should have the same left-right relationship with each other, so filming only occurs on one side of the axis. If this line is crossed, it changes the viewer's perspective in such a way that causes disorientation and confusion. For this reason, crossing the line is to be avoided.

- Match on action (or cutting on action) is an editing technique in which one shot cuts to another shot showing the action of the subject in the first shot. 

- The shot/reverse shot is often used when filming conversations. It is often a shot showing what the character is looking at, followed by a shot of the other character looking back at them, for example.

Below is my storyboard showing the outline of what shots I used in the filming of my short scene.

After this planning, I filmed and edited the recording I took of my preliminary task. I have made sure to include the match on action technique, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree line rule. Below you can see the 14 second long video I've made to show my storyboard.


Learning Comment:

In the planning of this task, I have learnt the different types of camera angles and editing techniques that are used to create a continuous scene in films. For example, the 180  degree line rule; I have learnt through using this in my preliminary task that it creates a better perspective of the shot for the audience and it means that the serrate shots become much easier to edit together.
When filming this task, there are a couple of things that I will take away and use when creating my real opening sequence. E.g when recording, I have learnt that I will need to press the record button on the camera but then wait about three seconds before actually enacting the scene. This is because I found that when editing together my footage, the first half of sentences were cut off because I pressed record and the dialogue started at the same time, so half of it didn't get recorded. I will be sure to use this to my advantage when filming my sequence.
I feel that the editing of this task would have been a lot smoother and easier if I had made sure that I had taken more time when filming, and therefore left more time to fit slightly longer transitions between shots. For example, the last few transitions in my edited sequences are cuts, so when editing my sequence for the real task, I can use a wider variation to make my sequence more interesting.