Preliminary Task Evaluation

Our group was filming our preliminary task in our school's main media studio. We had some decorations there to make it look more like a real room (brick walls, light bulb). We were given storyboards and script. Afterwards we went to find actors suitable for our script. We had a man and a woman having a conversation in the middle of the room and another person lying on the floor representing a dead body.
We had four people in our group, and we tried to share roles as much as possible, e.g. I tried myself as a cameraman and as a director. I filmed some of the shots, and then directed the scene. I did wide shots, close ups and some of the over the shoulder shots. Also I bubbled the camera each time we moved it to take another shot.

We had lots of high quality lighting equipment to use and we used quite hard light to emphasize the agressive scene. The body on the floor was lying just below the light bulb, so he could be easily seen. This was important because our actors were talking about it. I think this was an effective way to make an accent on important things.

This task was a good practice of using camera, because we moved it a lot to film different shots. We changed the height of the tripod to fit our needs and bubbled it afterwards. We made a couple of small mistakes when lighting equipment was in the frame, although we noticed it early so we refilmed the shot.

We planned our shots on our storyboard, so we could move the camera as little as possible. We filmed a wide shot first and then over the shoulder and close up shots.
After completing our planned storyboard shots, we had some time to experiment so we tried handheld shots, pans and tilts.

The people who were acting in our sequence were not professional actors, so we used markers to indicate their positions in the scene to make sure that they will stand in the same place in different shots, and teld them how they should to move not to break 180 degree rule.