Preliminary Task Evaluation

This is an evaluation of the preliminary task set as a practice for the main filming task. We were given a sequence that we had to follow which was:

Character approaches door
Character opens door
Character sits down in chair opposite Character 2
They share two lines of dialogue

We also had to include shot/reverse shot and match on action techniques as well as follow the 180° rule.

The match on action shots were the opening of the door (slides 2 and 3), when the “wigman” got burned (slides 9 and 10) and the running of the villain (slides 10 and 11). The shot/reverse shot was the conversation between the two characters in slides 6 and 7. These two slides showed clearly the following of the 180° rule because they were filmed from within the 180° region. The soundtrack fit along with the video and was synchronised with the clips. We managed to edit it easily and it did not take long because we did not have restrictions such as a time limit.

There are some obvious negatives that I can point out. Two of the shots (5 and 11) were shot sideways, which was very inconvenient because we did not find this out until we started editing and by then it was too late. Not all of the match on action shots were edited smoothly and that was due to not paying enough attention to small detail.

Within this sequence we represented the themes of injustice and violence clearly through the villain’s actions against “wigman.” The use of the character “death” was a last minute decision to show the dead character more explicitly and to add some humour, which was anchored by the sitcom laughter in the soundtrack. This film was shown to not be totally serious.

This task was simple and we managed to get through the problems of technology we were not used to quickly and ended with a simple but efficiently effective composition.