PRELIMINARY EXCERCISE & EVALUTATION.

In our preliminary exercise we had to demonstrate a basic understanding of certain filming techniques, these were the 180 degree rule, shot reverse shot and matching on action. Our task was to film a character walking along a corridor, opening a door and then having a brief conversation with the person inside. This was to give us basic understanding and experience prior to our contemporary noir openings we would later film. We put together a storyboard and scripted basic dialogue so our actors could remember their lines. Later we cut and edited our shots together using Final Cut.

                                     Evaluation of our preliminary.

During the shooting of our preliminary exercise, we had to demonstrate our basic knowledge in four areas, these were, cameraman, editor, sound man and director. We each took it in turns to do each action.

Whilst filming we took into account the 180 degree rule and managed to never brake it, this shows in our finished cut which clearly shows our understanding of the rule. We also learnt that the actual shots we were making would look more visually appealing if you shot using the rule of thirds and this we took into account in every shot, we would frame our shots so the actors in them would be on thirds. As we had around an hour to film our exercise, match on action was simple to achieve, there would be no irregularities between scenes. Although around half way through we show our actor walking through the door with no indication of another person approaching him and then in the next scene we clearly see a man outside the door. To improve this for our contemporary noir opening, we will make sure there are no members of the public are in our backgrounds.

Our shot-reverse-shots worked well, we managed to frame the person talking clearly and get the back of the recipients head and back. We ideally could have made the shots longer, a lot of the talking is done on the way to the table and this unfortunately restricted the dialogue to a few words during our shot-reverse-shot. Ideally we should have made our handles longer as during our shot-reverse-shot the dialogue seems cut together too fast and makes it seem unnatural.
 We used a panning shot when our actor moved to the table, this was done steadily but unfortunately we just cropped out his head in part of the scene, to prevent this in future we can either move the camera backwards or zoom out a little bit. Our focus throughout the exercise was superb, we didn't use depth and field and kept the entire picture sharp.  Sound was also not an issue, we managed to capture all our lines clearly and didn't accidentally lower the microphone so it was visible in our shots.