Preliminary Task - Evaluation

Preliminary Task - Evaluation

Peliminary Task- The Film

The Film

Our short film comes under the genre of Sci-fi and has two actors in it: a boy and a girl. We wanted quite a serious tone to our piece so we made sure that the costumes fit with our genre and style.  We have used a variety of shots in our film including: a long shot, close-up’s, over-the-shoulder shots, match-on-action, mid shots, a panning shot, low-angle, high angle and a two shot.

I worked with Charley Boughen and Catherine O'brien for the task and throughout the planning and making of the film, I drew up the storyboard as we discussed it, filmed some of the shots and was in charge of doing the make-up for our film.

Preliminary Task - The Filming

 

After our planning and having prepared our storyboard and script, we were ready to film and collected the appropriate equipment to do so: a video camera, and a tripod. When we had our equipment we practised using it by experimenting with how the tripod moved and how smoothly we could pan the camera in a circular motion so that it was easier to do when filming our actual film. I found using the equipment relatively easy however our tripod was quite stiff to move the camera up and down on and it was quite difficult to keep it steady but we practiced this movement beforehand and managed to make a smooth movement with the camera. I found the camera very easy to use and we filmed with it with no problems at all when creating our film.

Our film was filmed in the school and we had to be careful to make sure our film was consistent and flowed well from shot to shot. We also had to be careful of other people around the school and noises around us interfering with our shots and we had to re-film each shot a couple of times to get it right and for us to have a selection to choose from for our final film. When it came to choosing exactly where we wanted to film, we had to change location as what we had initially written in our storyboard wasn’t as suitable as we had hoped. We then had to film in a different location and this meant that some of our storyboard shots wouldn’t work in the different room to meet the requirements needed.

When we had finished filming all of our shots and watched them back again we noticed that we didn’t meet the requirement of the 180 degree rule and decided we needed to re-film a section before we could start to edit our film. We had to make sure that everything was exactly the same as it had been the first time we filmed it including: costume, props and also lighting. This wasn’t an enormous problem however as it was fairly easy to re-create what we had already filmed. The part that we had to re-film our match on action shot as this was where we did not meet the elements needed and so we moved the camera to the other side of the scene to solve our problem. We re-filmed the shots on both sides of the door and the footage matched in well with the rest of our film. We also decided to re-film a couple more of the shots with the dialogue in as when we watched the original ones back they weren’t quite loud enough as we were considering adding music over the top and we wanted to be sure that we would hear the voices.

As a group, we were very well prepared for our task and we each took on a specific role to ensure that the filming would run smoothly. We had discussed our storyboard together and when we decided to change location we made sure we were all happy with the changes before we went ahead with anything. On the day of filming we were each in charge of a different thing, one of us was getting and assembling the camera equipment, another in charge of getting the set ready and one more in charge of sorting costumes and make-up. When we were filming we each took turns to shoot a section using the equipment and inputted our ideas for the shot at each time. We worked extremely well together when filming and the helped to make sure that the process ran as smoothly and as quickly as it could.

Everyone in our group each contributed equally to the task and I really enjoyed working together to create our short film. I enjoyed putting all of the elements together when filming and seeing how everything we had planned looked and if it was how we expected. I liked seeing how the costumes and script worked and being in charge of changing what we wanted to as we filmed to improve our film.

Preliminary Task - Script

Preliminary Task Script

Setting: Master Zorg’s lair on the mother ship located in the galaxy of Farguay.

Magtina enters through door to the lair

Magtina: Jensigne, Flargen Zorg

(Greetings Master Zorg)

Master Zorg spins in chair

Master Zorg: Darsten minkto?

(Do you have it?)

Magtina puts briefcase on desk

Master Zorg: Rargen eesh

(Open it)

Magtina opens briefcase (Foley Effect)

Magtina: Toon darsten flaan

(What do you think?)

Master Zorg: (Shocked) sharp intake of breath

Preliminary Task - Storyboard

Preliminary Task - Description of Ideas

Description of Ideas

Having discussed the task and the necessary elements needed to include we decided to use the genre of Sci-fi for our preliminary task. We thought about how we could creatively incorporate different camera angles to fit with our genre and style for the piece and came up with a few different ideas. We thought about what sort of storyline we wanted to use and mind-mapped a few different ideas that might work before settling on the idea of having two actors and having a serious tone. Our storyline included a female ‘alien’ called Magtina and a male ‘alien’ called Master Zorg and it was a very short section of what could be a longer storyline or short film. We wanted to make our short film different and creative so we thought about scripting it in a artificial, ‘alien’ language and considered the idea of using subtitles. We wanted to use a range of costumes so discussed colours like blues and silvers which would fit with our genre and style.

We were careful to consider how we wanted to include the match on action, 180 degree rule and shot reverse shot in our preliminary task and wanted to make sure that our film included a person walking through a door and exchanging dialogue with another person. We started to think about creating our storyboard and were talking about how we wanted to include each of these elements. We discussed using math on action when a person was walking through the door and decided to use shot reverse shot when the two characters were going to have a conversation. We also wanted to include a range of different camera angles and movements to make it flow and work.

Joanna Hyde
Candidate Number: 5244