Fred's Dead; Preliminary task

Freds Dead from BDC on Vimeo.

For the preliminary task I was partnered with Roisin and Callum. At the beginning of Thursday's lesson we had a short discussion about what would be the best way to make a short film withj the requirements Miss Pemberton had given us which were:

-Film a character opening a door

-They cross the room & sit down opposite another character

-They exchange dialogue

- Match on action

-Shot reverse shot

-180 degree rule

When first shooting we wanted to make sure we had good natural lighting and a place where there wouldn’t be too many students around because this would ruin our continuity. We were happy with our filming, however due to a technical problem with the camera we weren’t able to use the footage.

The next day we filmed again which was easier as we more or less knew what we would be doing. Instead of focusing on a big story we kept the storyline and action simple so that our main concern would be getting the continuity perfect. Even though the location wasn’t as good as our previous choice, it still worked out okay as it was quite an isolated area so we weren’t really disturbed and where there were lighting problems we were able to fix it with the white balance and exposure.

I think we were successful in producing very good continuity. This is because when filming we made sure to keep the action exactly the same and film the same shot about 4 times at different angles. Having a lot of footage meant that we were able to play around a lot more on Final Cut Pro and where there were mistakes in one shot, we could easily use another. A problem I found was when we did the long shots it was hard to hear the narrative and when we tried to raise the audio levels during editing it also brought up the sound of background noise so a boom mic was definitely needed.

Another problem was that we didn’t have the one ‘money shot of me with my head in Roisin’s lap. This was filmed over the shoulder and if it was a wide shot with both of us in, it would have been visually attractive and completed the footage nicely.