Feedback notes

Fern, Gabby, George, Laurence

Assessment notes

Use of titles
Didn’t cross the line
Use of smooth pan
Shots are too wide
No match on action on the exchange of the drugs
Not complete!

The Preliminary Exercise - The Drug Deal

I completed the preliminary exercise with Fern Howe-Shepherd, George Blackwell and Lawrence Kingdom, I think our team worked well together although towards the end everyone was getting frustrated as we had to re-film a number of times, due to the fact that the computer wouldn’t pick up what we had previously filmed and some parts were over recorded. We originally assigned roles between ourselves as George and Fern acted I filmed and Lawrence directed but this changed when we re-shot (which is what you can see in the video above) as I now acted and Lawrence filmed while George directed. We shared the editing equally between us, so we all got a chance to edit and contribute ideas.

Our camerawork was not completed to a high standard as not all the shots were steady especially when the door shuts the camera jogs and we didn’t get to re-film this as we run out of time. Also our first shot of Fern opening the door is not in focus. During the shot reveres shot the camera is too high which makes the scene off putting for the audience. The shots are also not framed correctly, as we have a lot of unnecessary space which shouldn’t have been in the frame. The eye line and 180 degree rules were followed accurately, even though the camera was positioned too high during the majority of the filming, we still managed to complete this successfully.

From the trouble with camerawork the editing was difficult as the material we had to edit with was challenging to make look successful. This is partly due to the fact that our shots were too short, as the six second rule was not followed and the dialogue wasn’t long enough. Therefore when we came to edit the sequence, especially the shot reverse shot we discovered that it was too fast and therefore this meant the pace wasn’t correct. We realised after we exported our preliminary exercise that there was a lot of black screen at the end, which needed to be taken off.

There are a lot of elements that would need to be changed for example our match on action was not necessarily successful also are transitions are not invisible, therefore if we had the time to re-film and re-edit our shots we would need to make sure it flowed consistently and the shots were longer so the pace of this piece would therefore be correct. The dialogue is clear but is too quiet so it is hard to hear, which we should have noticed during editing, there is also some background noise at the start which should have been removed. To improve this we would need to make sure that before we started to film, the camera was correctly positioned to avoid any unnecessary props in the background and to make sure our framing is correct before we press record, to avoid any later trouble when editing.

In conclusions our preliminary exercise was not extremely successful as there are a lot of elements that could be changed and improved if we had the time, although all team members contributed evenly to this task. If we were to do this again we would need to make sure that time was not wasted during filming, so the shots would need to be accurate first time round so if we decided we needed to re-shoot anything then we would have enough time left at the end to do this as well as edit our material successfully.