David Duffy - Preliminary Task

David Duffy
Positives:

- Good use of fades in the dark room scene

- Match on action was well used

- Did not brake the 180 degree rule

- Use of dolly

- Good use of the pan shot

- Use of tilted camera

- Good presence


Negatives:

- Need to film more to explain narrative

- Better continuity editing

- Could lengthen the dialogue scene

- Make sure that white balance is set up correctly for every shot

- Use rule of thirds

- Put more soundtrack over film to hide sounds from environment

- Dolly was loud




Evaluation of Preliminary task from David Duffy
Narrative
We set about planning for our video positively as the three of us decided on our group quickly so we could get onto the more important stages. We started by discussing themes and narratives for our video, although we are not graded on narrative and themes in this task we thought that it would be best to present clear goals from the film. Also, it gives a better satisfaction to the viewer as the shots should make more sense. We decided to make a thriller based film as it would give us an excuse to make use of exciting shots that would hopefully provoke an uncomfortable response from the viewer. It would also mean that we would not need to use much dialogue which would expose our poor acting abilities.
We did gather some inspiration from a chase sequence from the horror film, Halloween; this clip is available to watch on our blog. We were inspired by this clip because of the use of parallel editing between the two characters and of the dark rooms. Also, the whole idea behind our film can be related to Halloween as it too features one supposed killer perusing a victim
Planning/Storyboard
Our planning stages went smoothly up until we were unfortunate with some group absences; this rushed us slightly as we probably should have scouted out our location shots early on as there is limited opportunity around the college to create something original. This forced us to make some compromises later on in the filming process.
Our storyboard, I believe, was one of our strong points as we came up with something decisive so we had a clear guide for the future filming. Luckily we were all present for the full creation of our storyboard so we were all aware of our

Filming/ Editing
This process proved to be much more complicated then we had previously anticipated. Certain aspects of our planning were neglected so when it actually came to the day we uncertain and perhaps we let ourselves be distracted.
We were constantly consulting the storyboard which we had made, which was good as it provided a clear plan of what we needed to do, but we relied too heavily on this. This resulted in us turning up to locations around the college that were unavailable due to lessons, or were not suitable for our film. One shot in particular that troubled us was the second shot of the sequence which was an over the head shot of a man standing in a room looking out of a window watching a man walking below. It was extremely difficult to film this as we chose the front entranced of the college to film this, where people are constantly moving in and out of the college. So this shot took a number takes before we were forced to settle with one.
This kind of problem with location seemed to crop up in many of our shots; probably the most difficult shot to film was the one inside the dark room. We used this room for obvious reasons; it’s dark, quiet and rarely used compared to other classrooms.
In terms of our ideas and the general quality of our shots I think that we were quite successful. The story of one man running from another for his life let us dabble slightly with parallel editing as some of our shots of each character were running side by side, however I do not think that we truly perfected this art and we could have made the attempt of parallel editing more obvious to the viewer.
The biggest mistake that we made in the making of our film was when we accidently filmed over a substantial part of our film as we had previously rewound our tape to watch over some previous footage and forgot to fast forward later. As a result of this we were rushed to get the missing shots filmed and to get the footage into the editing room. Another issue which was raised by this mistake was that it was just before the Christmas break and we had to make sure that two weeks later we looked the same in each shot, e.g. same hair style. But due to the lack of time we were unable to fully concentrate on different aspects of Mise en scene, we would have liked to do a more thorough job of correcting any details of our props and costumes.
We did not think that it was essential for this task but if we had more time we would have liked to decide on more convincing costumes to make it obvious to the viewer what kind of characters we were trying to create.
We did try to include all of the necessary material like the 180 degree rule. We all think that we could have been more successful in our usage of the 180 degree rule as we only had a brief scene including some dialogue at the end of the film, and one person doesn’t even say anything. Although despite this we still made sure that we stuck to the 180 degree rule.
One thing that I think that we did complete successfully was the use of match on action. We used the technique three times in our film, once it was of a man dropping some keys; the other two times was of the same man walking through doorways. We were impressed with how authentic it looked from such little time editing, but next time we will make sure that we spend longer looking at the sound that doors made.
We did include a variety of shots in our film, including:
-Extreme long shots
-Close ups
-High angles
-Two shots
-Medium shots
-Extreme close ups
-Pan shots
-Over the shoulder shots
-Tracking shot
I think that we used the height of the college building well to create one of our earlier shots. Although, as I have mentioned before, this was extremely difficult to do and we had to settle with a shot quickly.
Our tracking shot was a good idea, and although it was slightly shaky I felt that it worked well in our film. We had other good usage of shots as well as we did make sure to take time when we were filming to make sure that angles were correct.
Although lighting was not a huge focus in our film as we had little time, we did manage to use a silhouette briefly in one of our shots. It is a shot of the victim closing the dark room door behind him. This added to the sinister atmosphere we were trying to create
We used little edited sound in our video as we didn’t want to distract people from the footage. We used some parallel sounds through garage band for the closing titles; this matches the tone that is created by the title ‘67.03 seconds to live’.
Conclusion
Overall I would consider our task as a success as we created something that we can be proud of. However the project is still rough around the edges in the sense that the shots have not been perfected and our organisational skills let us down at times. If we had anticipated problems better then the whole process would have been much smoother and easier. Our editing process went well; even though we were new to the programmes used I think that we definitely created a watchable sequence, although it is obvious that we can improve on our continuity editing.