Planning: Preliminary task

what is a preliminary

The preliminary task is a trial to see how your group can work with a camera also enabling us to get used to filming in addition to this editing is also involved in this task. Furthermore within this task we must create our scenario and film it then edit it as a group.

The purpose of the Preliminary task was to simply learn how to be able to operate and film with a camera and also edit your filmed work. During this task we we had to experiment with the camera by playing around with different camera techniques such as shot sizes, angles and movements in order for us to find out which will be most effective for our actual thriller opening.

The Task
Since we had to create a 30 seconds scenario involving 2 people having a minimal conversation this was our opportunity to focus on camera techniques you would see in this scenario was as point of view, over the shoulder, close ups and medium shots. We came up with two locations, just outside school and in a hall way where people could sit and revise. As it was a place where people could sit and revise it was an obvious idea to have two people talking about work and revising together.

Production roles

We had to separate our group into individual roles to make sure we were all involved in this task in some way. I was the director and also the camera operator therefore it was essential that I experiment with the camera and what the character should be doing at the time. Our group decided to give me this role because I have some experience in camera work and I’m good at organising a group and making sure everyone knows what they’re doing. The edited work was done between the whole group as we are all creative individuals and therefore we could make a better edited version of our filmed work.

Difficulties we faced

 During editing we notice that we had to show that time has gone by as they have a conversation as we only had 30 seconds to show therefore we managed to overcome this as we found out the uses of the fade cut and wipe cut which was to show time has passed. During filming I also noticed that I spent too much time experimenting with shot and angle which led to us rushing in the end however it helped because now I have a clear vision of what camera techniques to use when actually filming the opening.