Preliminary Task

 

 For the planning of our preliminary task we discussed what we would like to have happen in the short film to begin with. Noting down in words what sequence of action we would like, and what dialogue should be used. After deciding on the action, we drew up a storyboard to decide what angles will be used, and set out to find a location for our filming. For this we needed a vacant corridor and room.

 We found finding a location very hard to do as most rooms were either filled with people, or locked. We eventually found a vacant room we were allowed to do some filming in, and started. 

 To start with I filmed George walking down the corridor, in a tracking shot of his feet tracking right. We decided to do this 3 times to get enough footage in case we needed extra. I found this shot hard as it was difficult to keep the camera in the correct shot (MCU) while holding on to the end of the tripod and having to look at the LCD screen.

 Next we decided to film George opening the door and walking into the room. We encountered one problem here, as when panning his entrance to walking to the chair, the white wrist-hold got in the way of the shot, and so we had to discard that shot and went for another. (We only discovered this in editing) We also found it harder to do this MCU shot as it had to be taken from the floor, and was at a slightly canted angle to give an uneasy feeling. We took 4 shots of this 

 After this we filmed George walking and sitting on the chair. We took 3 shots of this, and found it a relatively easy shot to do. The only difficult part of this shot was judging whereabouts George’s feet would be once he has sat down as we weren’t going to be using any camera movement. This again was an MCU.

 Next, George filmed me struggling in a chair, bound with some wire, in an MS. This was an easy shot to do as it didn’t require for the camera to be moved. We took 5 shots of this, as we needed extra footage from this to include in editing.

 After that, George and I set up the camera so that both of us were in view for the first shot of dialogue. This was difficult as we had to predict where we would be in shot once we sat down. However this turned out to be a good shot as it applied the rule of thirds and kept both characters in shot, while keeping the hooded person’s identity a mystery. (CU of George and an MS of me)

 Then we set up the camera so that both of us were in view, but both from the side in an MS. This was good as it established the location and showed the distance between the characters.

 Finally George filmed me in the chair in an MCU at a high angle while I spoke. This connoted that I was a ‘weaker’ character, George took 6 different shots of this, as it was hard to get the effect that we wanted for this shot.

 In editing we added a backing track to our shots. We decided to use a track from a game called ‘Half Life’ it gave a very eerie effect and we were very pleased with it.

One problem that occurred with this is that we had to put the volume of the backing track to a suitable volume, loud enough so you can hear it, but quiet enough that you can still hear the dialogue. Another problem we had with sound is that some of the other classes were heard during our filming of the corridor scene. The last sound problem we had was that we needed a scream when transitioning to the title screen. We hadn’t done this during our filming, so we had to go out and film a scream, we did two takes and chose the second, we then removed the picture, and cut the scream to fade in as the title screen comes in.

 During editing we arranged our footage in the correct sequence that we wanted. This meant that we had to be splitting different clips. We found this easy, but was difficult to choose how much to cut off, this mainly happened when cutting from the corridor to the struggling scene.

 After we had the correct sequence and sound we decided to add an effect. We decided we wanted our sequence in black and white, which was relatively easy to do and gave a good effect. However this did not make it as dark as we wanted, so we decided to alter the contrast. To get the correct amount of contrast that we wanted we had to fiddle about for a while with the degree of the contrast. After we found the degree we wanted we added a title screen by using a black background and fading in ‘The Room’. 

 From this task we learnt to do lots of experimental footage, and to do lots of the same shot to be sure that you get the best one possible. We also got some experience with the editing software and got some experience of using steadicam and panning and general use of the cameras. Overall we found this task very useful and will think about what to avoid in our opening sequence from our errors in our preliminary task.