Evaluation of Preliminary Task

In our Preliminary task we had to make a thirty to forty second film someone had to walk into a room and sit at a table with another person, and then leave the room again. We wanted our film to be different from the usual and a romantic comedy. We decided to create a blind date scene in a restaurant with a hidden twist. This twist was that the blind date turned out to be a man rather than a woman and the date was a complete mix up with the wrong name. By the end of it the guy storms out of the room disgusted that he has met a man.

Our Preliminary task was successful in the end. In this task we planned to make it as realistic as we possibly could. The main idea was that the character at the table was a man who looked like a girl, but the blind date who entered the room did not know this to begin with. Once the character has sat at the table with the 'woman' he believes it to be, he begins to question 'her'. He soon notices a name badge saying 'Jamie' and not 'Jannie' and realises that he appears to have facial hair. He then later throws the flowers he was clasping on the floor and storms out of the room. The genre of our film was comedy, and I feel that we portrayed this in a creative way. Our film makes you want to watch on and find out what is going to happen next. In the film we included eye level shots when filming, we did this because we thought it would bring the audience to the actor's level as they would be able to see exactly what the actor could. We felt that this would also make them feel more involved in the film almost like there were there themselves seeing it first hand. I think that this worked really well as the camera was kept in good focus and was well aligned through the duration of time that it was kept at eye level. Another camera shot that we used was shot reverse shot when focusing in on the conversation between the two characters. We wanted the audience to be able to see the facial expressions clearly when the character's were talking to each other, without the facial expressions the film would also loose some of its humour as this is what made the dialogue funny. Finally we included a 180 degrees shot around the table, this was so that the audience would get a full insight as to what was in the surrounding area and the props being used to create an effective setting to be in.

We had a few problems that were noticed after the filming process, once we had uploaded the video. One of the problems that we had was when we were filming an end shot we cut half of the actor's head off, mainly leaving focus on the torso. This was done with out even realising that it was a problem. This meant that the expression on the character's face could not be made clear to the audience of how he was feeling at that moment. Therefore the sense of emotion and feeling towards the end of the scene was lost. We solved this problem by cutting the end of the film so that is finished before the head was cut off. Another problem that we found was that our 180 degrees shot wasn't the full 180 degrees. We followed the eyes of the main character around a table, but we did not do the full turn. This could be easily solved by going around the entire table showing a clear shot of the opposing character already sat at the table. We will use this for future reference when filming a 180 degrees shot and will make sure that it is the correct angle. When the actors spoke in the film it was not as clear or as loud as it could have been, and therefore when you watch the film you have to listen carefully. This could have been done better by the actors speaking louder and clearer, as well as the video camera being even closer to the actors. We discovered a further problem once we watched the film again realising that we had a lot of unnecessary items that were in the background, for example, bags that held the props and people who were watching us record the film.

The setting in which we filmed looked realistic but it could have been improved if it was set somewhere else, such as a place off the school site. We used many props in order to make it look as real as possible to the audience but I felt that it still did not express where they were meant to be. At the beginning of the film we focused on a sign on the door which we made on the computer, however we needed to make the sign look a lot more professional and realistic in order to improve the beginning of the film. Also the door did not look like a restaurant door as you could clearly tell that it was a classroom door, I felt that we should have filmed at an actual restaurant to improve on our final result. As the main character entered, this was a form of introduction as to what was going to take place in the room. When we were editing we had to order each scene into the sequence that we wanted them to appear in. This meant either cutting pieces out and shortening them, or adding the scene in more than once.