Preliminary Task

For the Preliminary task we chose to do a basic short film including various camera angles, movement and transitions.

We chose to incorporate two female characters in our short film, who would meet and hold a brief conversation, enabling us to include diagetic sound. 

Shooting Schedule

X 1st Female                                                              Y 2nd Female

Setting: School Corridor









- Long shot of X walking towards the camera.

- Shot reverse shot of X walking away from camera, stops at a door and reaches for the handle.

-Close-up of the girl pushing the handle on the door down and opening the door.

-Long shot of the girl entering the room.

Setting: School Classroom

 



-Match on action panning shot of the girl walking from the door, across the classroom and sitting at a table.

(Abiding by the 180° rule)

-Medium over the shoulder shot of X as Y speaks.

-Medium over the shoulder shot of Y as X speaks.

-Repeat the previous two shots until the conversation comes to a close.

 

Throughout our time filming, we used a tripod to keep the camera at the correct height, steady and level. The use of a tripod also made the filming of the shot-reverse-shot and the match-on-action a lot easier to film and enabled us to keep the shot steady and smooth as we panned across the classroom and at the same steady height in the corridor. We repeated the filming of every scene so that we could make sure we had enough footage and this enabled us to choose from the various pieces of each footage we obtained, giving our film optimum quality.

We included both diagetic and non-diagetic sound to make our film a lot more impressive and professional. Our diagetic sound consisted of a scripted conversation between the two female characters.

Scripted Speech

X: "Did you hear?"

Y: "Hear what?"

X: "Cathy's pregnant!"

Y: "You have got to be kidding me."

Even though the speech was basic and minimal, enthusiasm and emphasis were used to make the conversation between the two characters exciting.

After we had uploaded our footage to Adobe Premier Elements on the computer by using a USB cable, we saved it as raw footage, in case of any problems we may encounter whilst editing. We then used Adobe Premier Elements to edit our footage and create our short film. We used a logical method to edit our footage, firstly we cut our footage into sections, which pieces of footage belonged to each shot, by doing our editing like this, it was very clear and easy to cut any unwanted or excess footage. Once we had all of the shots seperated with numerous takes of each, we began to choose which of the takes would be optimum for each shot. We decided to use editing transitions, fade in and outs, at the beginning and end of the film to make the film appear more professional and of a higher quality. 

During the editing process, we added non-diagetic sound to our footage, we did this by importing non copyrighted music into the editing software Adobe Premier Elements, we chose a dark but enticing soundtrack to introduce our film, continuing the use of this until the conversation begins where the shocking news is revealed. By using a dramatic piece of sound, suspense is built-upon and increases tension.

Before this, I had only done amateur videos on any video editing software and didn't fully understand the technical aspects and their effects, however by doing this project my knowledge has broadened.