Studio lesson 4: Preliminary task

For our preliminary task we were asked to film several shots to create a film sequence.

This task was a group one so I worked with Jess, Hanna and Giorgia.

We worked on the Sony Nx5 camera.

We connected straight away setting up the scene and the different roles, we collaborated to create a good piece of work and we decided to incorporate few extras and give our how interpretation of the script.

 

 

The sequence was about a conversation between two different characters arguing for something unknown.

Our set was Luke’s class. We moved tables, chairs and objects around to give ourselves enough room.

In the set we included few elements that helped to give more detailed to our sequence later on.

The general idea of our video was two girls meeting and having and argument, the reason is unknown as it creates a suspicious and mystery feeling, character A, Hanna, is the bad character that wants something to be done and to happen no matter what. Then we have character B, Jess, the one that back up from the action and is doubtful about everything.

We add and hockey stick and the door as props for our sequence.

For our task we had to do a wide shot to set the sequence, close up and over the shoulders shots.

The wide shot was our first shot as it sets the scene and you have a general idea of what is happening, in this case was the argument between the two characters.

The wide took around less than a minute but as we learnt in our previous lesson that it is very important to have all the material for the editing part we shot this seen at least a couple of time.

We than moved onto the over the shoulder shot, where we had to apply the 180 degrees rule. I found that this shot was the one that created more problems as we needed to find the right position of the camera to don’t cover the character we were interested as well as to show the other. We firstly lifted the tripod to our average height and moved it around until we found the best position and recorded this several times, as we did that we recorded the close up as well of the characters to get in detailed their face expressions.

To helped our self recording the close up we put on the ground signs for the actresses to have a clear idea of their standing position, so once we had the camera in position we were sure we would have got the close up, without any camera movements.

We decided to add extras, we recorded the close up of the passing of the hockey between the characters and we had a close up of the entrance of character A into the class room as well as the close up of the door opening and shutting. The shutting of the door is going to be a pleonastic sound once we are going to edit the sequence together.

We realised that we were really focused on what we were doing and we tried to get straight away all the main shots done to concentrate on the details. As our fourth lesson I thought it went well as we realised we knew more of recording than we thought.

Analysing the clips help up to realised what we could have done, so in this case add more extras do make the sequence as detailed as possible.

This transform our scrip into a thriller, we then uses crops that made everything more intense, as well as the actresses used their body language, face expressions and varies of voice tones to give tension throughout the scene.

Editing is the actual step where everything starts to come together and there we will start to realise all our mistakes and our skills. We are going to think as editors where the audience is going to be the biggest judge.