Pre-lim task

Pre-Lim Task

For our preliminary task we had to shoot a short scene of someone walking down a corridor, through a door, sitting down and exchanging a few lines of dialogue. The aim of the task was a) to have perfect continuity and a seamless clip, and b) develop good understanding of the equipment and get used to using it.

In our groups we began talking about some ideas that we could use in our scenes. We knew it didn’t have to be a literary masterpiece, but we did want to have some sense of narrative, and also keep with the theme of Thriller. I suppose at first we were slightly ambitious and began talking quite enthusiastically about all the different shots we could use, however when we started to think how we could actually shoot it, it became clear that we should keep it simple. We thought that less is more, especially when we are not that experienced with the equipment.

We came up with a very simple scene, and began drawing out a story board. We decided on these shots:
1. Long shot from behind of someone walking down the hall
2. Tracking shot from the right not showing the persons face
3. Close up on the persons hand on the door
4. Person coming through the door from the other side
5. Person comes into a two shot and sits on a chair
6. Shot reverse shot with dialogue
7. Close ups of expressions
8. Mid shot of person walking out

Luckily, I had used the equipment before for my GCSE trailer so I had a lot of experience working with the cameras and tripod. However, there are new HD cameras since last year, which weren’t very different in regards to controlling them, but I did feel like they were much more valuable and therefore was a little scared to handle them at the beginning. I didn’t find it difficult to actually film the scene as I have done filming before and am quite confident with it. We took the shot at least three times each to guarantee to give us more of a chance of one of them being right. At the time we thought we were taking special care about continuity, but looking back I think we could have been a lot more vigilant about it just to make sure everything was seamless and nothing looked odd.

The filming of our pre-lim was successful. There were some things we had to adapt to, for instance the place in school where we wanted to film was busy so we had to change the shots slightly. Luckily our shots weren’t very complex, however, you would need to be prepared for something like that to happen on a larger scale when things aren’t so changeable. Another thing we had to deal with was the lighting. It was a lot darker than we expected but from the viewfinder it didn’t look too bad, and maybe even contributed to the narrative and mood. Also we can treat the footage on Final Cut to make it slightly lighter if needs be. Another thing we hadn’t thought about was the fact that other people actually use the corridors. A few times our scene was interrupted which wasn’t really a problem as we could shoot again, but I think we were a bit of a blockage in the corridors that people did not appreciate.

I think we stuck to our story board very well and filmed all of the shots in it, while also adding some more. I think this was a good thing because if you are prepared with all your shot written down or drawn exactly how you want them, and you can stick to it, the shoot will be a lot smoother and it also allows more artistic licence when it comes to filming.