Tuesday, 9 November 2010

Casting options for Preliminary project

Due to this being our first time making a short film we are not really fussed about who could star in our project. We do have a few ideas but we do not want to intefer with other groups and their work. However, seeing as it is our first film we would like to focus mainly on the behind the scenes aspects. As it is only a preliminary project we are not bothered about the quality of the acting as this project for us, is mainly about getting used to the equipment.

AS Media Continuity Project



Our first filming project for AS Media was a continuity project. We had to film a simple scene using simple camera shots such as Shot-Reverse-Shot and an Over the Shoulder (OTS) shot. First of all I had to get in to a group of no more than 4 people. The group was Myself, Brendan and Ben and we began to discuss ideas of what to film for our project.

After discussing we came up with the simple idea of a job interview that would only last approximately 20 seconds long using the camera shots shown earlier. After the discussion we then wrote down a storyboard for our film that consisted of 6 pages detailing every shot that we will se on the final cut. We then all proceded to work on the script the following lesson. It described a simple layout and actions for the characters. The dialogue was very simple consisting of 3 lines of dialogue for each character.

We then searched around the college looking for a suitable room for our job interview to take place. We then settled for room 100. The next 2 hour lesson we went there and filmed our job interview. We had to set up where our characters would sit. This caused a problem because of the lighting. If we tried to film the way we initially planned one of the characters would of been to hard to see due to the lighting in the background. To overcome this we had to rearrange the tables in a way that would not affect the lighting in our scene. It took up practically the entire lesson. As we had to get the conversation showing both characters. So to do this we just set up the camera on both sides (following the 180 degree rule which is shown on the video at 0:02-0:07 seconds and 0:09-0:22 seconds) and filmed the conversation. It also took time to set up the camera and film both the exit and the entrance of the interviewee. We had to show examples of match on action (shown on the video at 0:07-0:09) and Shot-Reverse-Shot (shown at 0:10-0:20 seconds) The filming process was possibly the most challenging part of making our film as setting up the camera seemed to take much longer and was more challenging then we thought it would be.

The next lesson we began on the editing process of our film on Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. Here we cut our film in a way that would help the flow of continuity. On the editing suite we added sound bridges (an example of a sound bridge on the video would be at 0:06-0:07 seconds) as the sound does not change after the cut and flows fluently). Editing was one of the easier parts of making our film as one of the group members (Ben) had used an editing suite before so knew how to work it out therefore getting through the editing process quicker.

Monday, 8 November 2010

Rough outline for preliminary project

After discussing our ideas for our preliminary project we finally came up with an idea which was very simple and easy to film. We all contributed to it and visited possible locations where we could film (we decided on room 180).

Our rough outline consisted of -
  • A man walks in to a large room
  • Another man is waiting already at a desk
  • The man reveals he is at a job interview
  • They briefly talk
  • He hands a CV to the manager
  • The man leaves
We decided this should be done in a large romm making it easier to film shot reverse shot. We decided it should be an indoor film to avoid continuity prblems with the weather.

Filming for our Preliminary project.

Seeing as this is near enough the first time we are all filming, or at least the first time we are working as a group, we will be taking just the standard equipment to film our scenes. As all of our shots will be taking place in one enviroment on the inside no special equipment needs to be taken for outside shots.

For this filming project we will be using
  • Panasonic Handheld Cameras
  • Tripod
  • Ben's a200 DSLR for possible stills
The rest of the equipment and props are provided in the place we will be using.