Pre-lim; pre-production

Prelim.

Pre- Production

  To start off on our coursework, we were told to create a short prelim as a basic introduction for what it is like filming and editing a scene. It only had to be 30 seconds- 1 minute long so we had a chance to play around with different camera techniques and angles and how to edit the video. The task of the prelim was to film a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down opposite another character, where the two characters will start a couple of lines of dialogue. The task had to demonstrate match on action, which basically means we have to add continuity to the scene so that it flows nicely from one part to another. Shot/reverse shot, which is used when the two characters are talking to each other and when they say a line, the camera will go between them and show their faces while they are saying there individual lines. Also the 180 degree rule, which is if the camera is showing a conversation between two people, the camera has to stay within the 180 degree line on one side of the two people talking, so we don’t distort the footage and change the perception of the audience on the footage, we were told to use smartphones to record as they are much easier to use, and we wouldn’t need a better camera for a 1 minute video. To edit the video, we were told to use an app called Splice.

To start off, we watched the prelims from other year groups who are doing the same coursework as us, and got a brief look at what we had to do and ideas for it. When we first started planning we made a storyboard on each of the main parts of the prelim, so we decided to make it work based, like one person is going into another room to help the other person out with homework, which means we decided to have one person walking down a corridor, with the camera focusing on the persons legs, walking down the corridor. We decided to create the prelim so that the camera does not show the first persons face, until he is sitting down facing the other person, to create an effect which would intensify the situation, although it sounds stupid for a harmless prelim that is not meant to be a thriller, we just did this to try and see if it worked and whether or not we could perhaps use this idea in our final piece.

We figured out the different camera angles we would use while the two characters were talking like the shot reverse shot, a two shot, and a viewpoint shot from above, this meant that we could get a good idea on how we could record scenes in the future using all these camera angles. When we had figured out what we were going to do in the storyboard, we went out to try and find a good place to record. When we were walking around the school, we found a small room, in a quieter area of our school and decided to record here, so we started to plan around the room, like what we were going to use as props and how we are going to film, after we sorted that out, we started filming.