Preliminary Task

Filming and preparing my preliminary task taught me many different things. For example how organization in filming is very important before filming. Before setting up the camera i had to work out exactly where i needed to put it in every shot to make sure i didnt break the 180 degree rule.

Below is the plan of where i decided to set the camera in each shot.


As you can see i choosed to shoot each shot so that the camera did not cross the other side to break the 180 degree rule. i put the height of the camera at head height when the person was entering the building, walking across the room and moved the camera with the actor as she walked across the room to sit on the seat.
Whilst filming the task at times i noticed it was very hard for the actors to concentrate and not laugh for example. This made me realise just how many takes they must do in movies. With the issue of re doing shots because of lack of concentration from the actors this made me think of using a clapper board which i did, and gave me a lot of help whilst editing the task as i could straight away find which take i needed of each shot.
Here is a typical example of a clapper board-

EDITING MY PRELIMINARY TASK
As i said about using a clapper board in my filming this became very useful as i could find exactly which take i needed of each shot. For the text at the beggining 'Where is he?' i used a plain and simple text in white so it standed out from the background and so it was easily read. I used a fade in, fade out on the text to make it fade in at the beggining and after about a 2 second pause fade out again all during the actor was walking into the building. For each shot i used a straight cut rather than a fade or dissolve between each clip during editing so it gives someone whos watching it the impression that everything is happening straight away with no pause, for example when the actor walks in to the building and then the camera is recording inside, this looks as if it is all happening fluently by using match on action and not using a dissolve or fade in my editing.

Shot Reverse Shot

Shot Reverse Shot is another film technique I learnt.

I found that it is where one character is shown looking at one character and then, the character being looked at in the beggining is then found looking back at the other character or first.

Continuity Editing

Another editing rule is 'Continuity editing' otherwise known as 'Match On Action'.

I learnt that this is when you say are filming someone walking into a building and shutting the door behind them, and then want to carry on filming inside the building when they are just walking in and closing the door behind them. To make this look as if the whole shot has been shot at the same time giving an impression that there are more than one cameras is where the editing of Continuity takes place. This is done by when filming the person walking towards a building and then closing the door, you would then film the exact same movements but inside the building. so when editing you can move these two shots together and say wen an actor puts his/her hand on the door handle to open it you would then use the shot that was filmed inside the building and match the same movement of the hand on the door handle so it looks as if it is running continuously.

180 Degree Rule

Before filming my premliminary task i need to know some basic filming rules like the 180 degree rule. I learnt from this that say two characters in a scene should always have the same placing in a shot for example if two actors were facing eachother one on the left and one on the right then whenever moving the camera for a difernt angle on position the actors should remain in the same position as they were in before i.e the actor previously on the left should be on the left of the shot again and the same for the actor who was on the right.