Preliminary Task Evaluation

The location I filmed my preliminary task in was the Studio. This worked very well as a location because we were able to re-arrange the objects in the studio which were chairs, a table and draws. We put the draws and the table in the corner of the 'room' (area we were filming) to make it look a bit like an office, and then had one chair situated infront, and the other along the side which was then going to be pulled over by one of the characters. I wasn't the director or directly behind the camera however I took a very active role in filming. I checked that the boy who was behind the camera was doing the correct thing and had things in the correct places, and it was often that he didn't so I told him where it should be and we discussed what looked best.



The thoughts towards lighting that we had was that we wanted quite a light set to film on so we could see the actors in detail. We therefore had a big bright light coming from the right corner onto the actors. This was important to the scene as it focused on two people who we needed to see clearly and in detail. It also showed that they were in a normal office and let us see the objects in the room and thus distinguish that they were in an office. This was effective as it made sure that every part of the set was light and there were not some bits lighter than others. However, there was one point where it would have been better to have an extra light as we were filming in a different part of the studio. This turned out to be fine though as we just situated the original light in a different place.



We set up the camera correctly by bubbling the tripod to make sure it was stable, and then locking in the camera. We then zoomed in on a part of the wall and set the white balance correctly. We made sure the exposure, focus and zoom were all in the right places. We checked the tripod was level in each shot and made sure the bubble was still in the centre. We checked the shot was framed correctly each time, and if we had doubt then we filmed it again just incase. We moved the lighting and camera equipment to make sure it was not in the shot, and one time when we changed the position of the camera a light came in that was not there before. We then had to move it before we took the shot to make sure that there was not objects that were just appearing. We chose appropriate angles for the shots, and made sure that the whole of the actors bodies were in the shots at all times. Therefore, we did a straight on shot of them when they are sat down but for the over the shoulder shot, it was harder to get their bodies in and we therefore filmed it from a much higher angle to make this possible. We filmed the shots using practical planning. We started off with the wide shot and filmed the whole thing a couple of times to be on the safe side. We then filmed the whole sequence as an over the shoulder shot, followed by a close up of that person as we only needed to zoom in and not move the camera. We did this the same on the other side and then went on to film the very beginning and very end, when we had one of our actors coming in and out of a door. There was no need to film a medium shot, as this was not involved in the sequence. We made sure to conform to the 180 degree rule and were constantly thinking about it especially when we had to move from one over the shoulder shot to another. I often imagined an imaginary line at 180 degrees to stop us breaking it. We used appropriate terminology on set. Our director would start of by saying 'stand by' to which we would all reply 'standing by' once we were in our places. She would then go on to say 'roll' and the camera man would say 'rolling' once he had started recording. After this she would say 'action' and the actors would start the scene. Once the scene had finished, she would say 'cut' and the camera man would wait around 5 seconds before stopping the recording.