Preliminary task

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDxBGwLVhcU

For my groups preliminary task we created a short edited sequence using various different conventions. It had to be between 30 seconds to a minute. The reason for doing this task was to see what strengths and weakness' we had as a group and to generally become more familiar with using a camera. This task helped us notify what type of elements are essential when planning a film. This is so we would be prepared when it came down to making the real thing. There was a balance of different inputs and we managed to create a 45 second clip with both flaws and good qualities.

A flaw of our task was that we used a hand-held camera this meant that our camera movement was not stable and our shots where off balance and not exactly what we wanted. The camera was therefore not only effected by the movement of the shot within filming but also the sound from having to move the camera so often, this could be avoided if a tripod was used. Another fault we found was that there was background noises within our filming which we had to cut out because you couldn't hear the actors or the movements they was making and the footage looked very unprofessional and it lowered the realness of our task it looked like it had been filmed by students instead of having the right sounds in the right places. This weakness can be avoided by making sure there is no people around when filming and try to get the weather just right so that wind also does not effect the sound on the microphones and the camera microphone itself.

A positive about our preliminary task is the different types of camera shots we used, we managed to use most shots apart from birds eye view and underneath profile shots. These are useful within thriller films as it allows the audience to know when someone is going to be in danger at that moment or very soon. If a person is filmed from above it usually means they are vulnerable and if it is from below it usually means they are powerful. To add more of a narrative to my task we should have filmed Luke from below and Britney from above it would have added well to the story line and would have helped my group understand how camera shots guide the audience through a film.

By doing this task it has helped my group come to grasps with how to simply use a camera correctly, adjust and use a tripod productively and over all prepare us for making our own thriller. We have started to think a lot more about shots and placement and sound within our thriller now and this task has shown us that each piece needs to be filmed accurately and individually in order to make a good thriller opening. We hope by doing this task it has allowed us to make mistakes and learn from them so that in the real thriller filming we will have as little faults as possible and be able to use all of our footage as this time some of our footage was such bad quality you could not here the actors or it was too bad of quality. We know to plan before starting our thriller now and to leave ourselves time to edit and re-shoot footage if anything goes wrong. We made a good first task, and i think we was able to discover our problems and solve them with ease. We need to be prepared for all of the faults we found within this task and make sure they do not reflect in our next.