Evaluating the Preliminary Task

I was asked to film and edit a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down on a chair opposite another character, with which he/she exchanges a couple lines of dialogue.

I prepared for this task by doing a storyboard. This storyboard showed what will be on each shot. This also detailed the type of shot and camera and character movement. This pretty much shows what happens on each shot.

We used three shot techniques to make up the film. One is match-on-action shot. In this shot, I was the actor on camera. We took a mid-shot showing my upper body, and an extreme close-up of my hand pushing the door open. This makes the audience know the character, and the extreme close-up makes the audience focus on my hand opening the door. The framing in this shot is focused on the character and the setting. The mid-shot showed where the character is in the room. Also, in this shot I was positioned in the centre of the shot, making me the focus of the shot.

 

The second technique is shot-reverse-shot. In this shot, I was one of the actors on screen. For this, we used over-the-shoulder shot. We used this shot to clearly show a conversation and who was speaking. The framing in this shot focused on the two actors on screen. However, the framing also included people behind the actor. On this shot, the actors were positioned in the centre of the screen, with only a bit showing the background.

 

Next was the 180-degree-rule. We used this rule so as not to confuse the audience. We use a long shot of the actors on screen. We used this shot to show the dialogue exchange between the actors and to clearly show the position of both actors. This shot also helped to prove the 180-degree rule, as the actors are clearly shown and they stayed on the same side of the screen even though the shot angle was changes. In this shot, the actors were positioned in the centre of the screen, opposite each other.

        

          The final result was good. I was pleased with it, because the transition between the shots was smooth.  Also, because we were able to use every shot, the editing went smoothly and only needed little work.

          On the other, we could still improve it.  For one, we could move the camera closer when we did the shot-reverse-shot. This way the only focus would be the actor, and the people in the background won’t be shown.

          As a group, we worked fairly well. We divided the work evenly. This way we were able to work efficiently as a group, which made the final result better.

          I also got used to editing using Imovie. Now I feel fairly confident I can do better editing next time. I was also able to use many shot types, and I got confident in using the camera better.