Preliminary Task - Friday 21st January 2011

The task we were given (as stated in my previous post) is the following:

Film and edit a character openning a door, walking into a room, walking across the room, sitting down and having a 2 line conversation with another character in the room. I will also be demonstrating my use of match-on action, shot-reverse-shot and the 180 degree rule (keeping the camera on one side of the action).

Shot list - Description

1 Tilt shot behind a person walking up the stairs
2 Aerial shot from the landing of the person climbing to the top of the stairs
3 Reverse tracking shot up to the door (almost)
4 MS showing person's hand turning door knob
5 CU of the person's hand turning the knob
6 LS of other person looking at his mobile then looking up at the camera surprised
7 POV - Door starting to open
8 MS behind person openning door
9 Pan in room showing person walking in and over to the person sitting down
10 MS - Person saying: 'Have you been waiting?'
11 MS - Other person: 'I nearly fell asleep. What time do you call this?'
12 CU - Person: 'You won't believe this - but I just discovered Elvis is still alive!'
13 CU - Other person looking shocked

The actors involved are two males playing male parts, they are Jake Smallwood playing the person walking into the room and Bradley Dalton as the person in the room. No props will be used, the settings are the hallway downstairs, the landing leading to the Media classroom and the Media classroom itself and the lighting is most likely to be high-key.

Filming began soon after this post was originally published. Bradley operated the camera for the first half of the shoot (the sequence involving Jake walking up the stairs to the classroom). Some difficulties faced during filming was the tripod not being useful for the aerial shot so it was done hand-held. Another difficulty faced by us was the tracking shot was hard to pull off since Bradley fell on the stairs during one of three takes we did before nailed it. The final problem we faced was a bad panning shot I did as I had forgot to loosen the tripod so it ended up moving jerkely. The film I think would have turned out to have been a good one had it not been for a problem mentioned in my next post.