Evaluation of Preliminary Task - Katie

For our premilinary task, we were asked to create a short clip using continuity editing. Continuity editing is a technique where the audience feel as though they are watching a scene in real time. In my group, we decided to centre the idea of our clip on a school shooting. 

We were given about 40-50 minutes to plan our task and during this time, we had to think about the genre of the clip, as well as who would play what character and the location of where we would film. Our group worked quickly and efficiently to get all of our ideas together and come up on a final idea for our preliminary task. We decided on filming in our school theatre and myself and Natalia took on the role of being the 2 main actors, while Jade filmed and Jasleen played a short role, as well as helping with directing me and Natalia on what to do and how the lighting should be. We stuck to using little dialogue, as we didn't want to make our clip too long or complex, so stuck to the requirement of having about 2 sentences each. In our preliminary task, we had to stick to a few guidelines, of a conversation consisting of two or more lines, a character opening a door and walking through, 
and two characters sitting down across from each other, talking.

After deciding on the roles we would take on, we moved on to the production process. Before going out to film, Jade played around with the camera angels, deciding on which angle would be best to create tension and an atmosphere. As well as angles, lighting was a big issue when filming. The lighting was different in different locations of the school, for example in the hallway the lighting was a lot brighter and a better quality, due to the big windows allowing natural light to stream in. However in the theatre, where there is no natural light, the quality of the camera was slightly fuzzy and the red light we used to create a scary sort of made it hard to make out mine and Natalia's faces. This is something we could work on in the group and try to use natural lighting more in our filming. As well as lighting, we had to deal with the sound. The school hallways were quite empty and therefore caused sound to echo, also it picked up a lot of sound, like the closing of a door or other groups filming.    

Shot Reverse Shot is used to capture a conversation by two characters. An example of when we used this was when Natalia and I were sitting on the floor in the theatre and spoke about where the killer was. We edited two separate shots, one taken from behind my shoulder, capturing Natalia’s face, and one taken from behind her shoulder to capture my face.  We then edited these two shots together to show mine and Natalia’s facial expressions from what the other is saying. 

                   Example of shot reverse shot 

Match on Action is an editing technique where one shot cuts to another to match the first shot, and this makes it seem the action has taken place in real time. An example of this in our work can be seen when Natalia is running through the hallways and turns the corner to the theatre to open the door. Although the shots are taken from different places, it makes the audience feel that she never stopped running. 

180 Degree Rule is a rule where characters in the scene have the same left-right relationship with each other. We used this when the conversation in the theatre took place between myself and Natalia.