Preliminary Task

Preliminary Task: Storyboard 

The Storyboard:

We begun our preliminary task by creating a story board. We drew our storyboards in as much detail as possible, splitting two pieces of A3 paper into six sections and making note of the action, sound, camera shot, editing and duration of each shot.

The durations of shots specified on our storyboard were not precise as we were unsure the timings necessary to fulfil the actions required but they were instead relative to one another ensuring that we could determine the pace of the piece.

Filming:

The process of filming our preliminary task was fairly smooth taking just over and hour for our group to film what we needed.  We filmed predominantly in chronological order with the only pieces filmed separately being the tracking shots through the classroom, filmed separately because the classroom was in use, and the ninth and twelfth shot, which we filmed at the same time with the camera on a tripod in the same place to emphasise the comedic nature of the characters' interaction.

The shot reverse shot section was again filmed out of order as we shot each person in one take moving the camera progressively closer to their face to maintain the angle from which we were filming.  This was then edited together to be a shot reverse shot, observing the 180 degree rule.  another issue encountered by our group during filming was filming the closeup tracking shots of the character's feet and face.  We did not have a camera dolly to help us move the camera with ease and after some consideration we concluded that the easiest was to get a steady result was simply to hold the camera manually.  Although the camera work in these shots is not perfect we were quite happy with the outcome as the unsteadiness did not interfere with the overall result too much.

Editing:

Editing was generally quite easy for our group as we had paid close attention to continuity errors whilst filming and it was therefore just a case of placing the shots in the correct order and ensuring that they matched up correctly with one another.  The hardest part of editing was the match on action shot as the character goes through the door form the corridor to the class room this was because we had to ensure that she was in exactly the same position from the previous shot to the next.  Another issue encountered was the swiftness with which the actors came out of character, this made some scenes appear quite stunted as we were forced to prematurely cut takes so as not t ruin the mood of the scene.  The sound was again fairly easy to edit as there was no dialogue in our piece however the visual editing of the scene did lead to some continuity issues with the sound which were corrected by looking through some of the unused footage, finding the sound needed. once we had finished the ambient sound we moved on to the non-diegetic music in the confrontation scene which we picked specially to build tension. To accompany this dramatic music we decided to add some animation to intensify the drama and emphasise the dramatic surprise ending.