Preliminary Task: Evaluation

We created a short film made out of 12 shots including a short dialogue between two characters and must contain the 180 degree rule and shot reverse-shot within it. We were also asked to include match on action.

In pre-production we had create a draft storyboard from an A3 piece of paper folded in to 12 squares. The 12 squares represented each of the shots that would be recorded and briefly explain the context, after this modifications to the storyboard were made and we had decided the final planning for out short film. We then moved our plan into 12 sheets of A4 paper where we would explain each shot in more detail, including the types of shots, angle, character, locations and dialogue needed. Once this was completed we took 3 photos of the main areas that would be used in the short film and 2 photos of the people that were playing the roles in my preliminary task, after this we were ready to record it. This process helped us prepare for recording the raw footage as we were organised and knew exactly what would be required for each shot, this made production easier and more structured.

In production the establishing shot and a character walking in the room went perfectly fine, but we struggle trying to replicate the point of view angle when Dwayne pulls the chair and turns the door handle as we were using an iPad to record we had some difficulty trying to prevent anything else but the hand showing up in the shot. A big mistake that was made was I recorded one shot in portrait and another in landscape which didn't help with trying to keep verisimilitude. The last issue we had whilst recording was when recording the last line of dialogue, Lewis had trouble saying a line that was pretty long and managed to accumulate 12 failed attempts.

In post production I used premier pro to edit my preliminary task. The process of my editing stage goes as follows

1. I imported all the clips I had recorded into premier pro 
2. I trimmed all the clips to the sections that were needed (removing any blank bits of video and or audio)
3. I muted any unnecessary noises from certain shots
4. I scaled my whole work area to scale to frame size, this allowed the aspect ratio to fit most monitors
5. I added a dip in to black video transition to the establishing shot and Dwayne walking in to the interview room
6. I then used video grabby to download an audio track to my iTunes library which I then imported into premier pro and places in my work area
7. I added key frames to the audio to make the track fade out when the dialogue starts and key frames after the dialogue to bring the music back up for the outro
8. I then used the razor tool to trim the audio at the end to finalise the short film

When I had finished my preliminary task was very pleased that it met all the expectations of my set brief, including having shot reverse-shot, the 180 degree and match on action all within 12 shots. The parts that I was confident with was the editing process, as I found it particularly easy to cut clips and match them with other shots. The part I was least confident with was recording the establishing shot as seamlessly as possible, other than this I did not find any struggle with my task. I can identify that an area I need to develop is remembering to record all of the shots in one orientation to help verisimilitude.