coursework evaluation

Media studies coursework, Continuity exercise.

Evaluation

For our coursework we were asked to do a continuity exercise, We had to film for a short period of time making sure no time had past and we had to try and avoid time delays during the conversations. In our continuity exercise we filmed our first character (David) entering the room. He enters the room and sits down beside our second character (Oisin). They share a few quick lines of dialogue and then David gets up and leaves the room again. During or filming we included over the shoulder shots, close-ups and long-shots.

The simple things were important when preparing our project, firstly we needed to acquire actors to carryout the dialogue and this was more difficult than expected. We shot our film with two people but the next day one of the boys was unable to get out of class so we had to reshot the whole thing. we had to ensure that our actors stayed in the same position when saying their lines and this proved a problem, the reason for this is that we had to shoot the same clip many times and then decide which we would use, if the actor is continually moving his arm then this may effect continuity. Our second actor David kept his hand over his mouth when talking and at first we didn’t even notice. To avoid continuity errors we had to make sure that things in camera view had to remain in the exact same position and again this was a problem. When we were editing the piece and trying to put clips together we noticed that sometimes objects were moving around and again this effects continuity. Usually things like this were not noticed until the editing phase and sometimes had to be reshot. We had to make sure our cameras had enough battery power to carryout the filming we needed and also every back round sound interfered with the filming and this had to avoided. Establishing continuity was vital in this task and lots of precautions had to be made.

In order to have a successful project we needed to prepare and to do this we made a storyboard. The Storyboard contained the shots we were going to use and also the dialogue we wanted the actors to exchange. This helped us when we were shooting as our group who were filming knew what shots to include and the actors knew what to so and what actions to perform if necessary. Our group was made up of three people, Lauren, Daniel and me. We each had different tasks, when filming we all tried to share this responsibility and we usually used to cameras at the same time so we could get more shots in. I was also responsible for the actors, I tried to constantly remind them of their lines and when they made mistakes we all tried to solve the problem of fixing the dialogue and also the shots we used.

For our exercise we decided to film in a lunch room, we filmed during class so the room was empty and the corridors were quite. This helped us capture the sound in our filming and avoided any back round noise. The lighting in the room we used and in the corridor became a problem. At first the corridor was quite dimly lit and we took a few clips of the first scene, but when we returned and shot the same clip again at a different time we noticed the lighting had changed and this effected continuity drastically. The main thing I learnt from this was with the conditions we were in it was important to try and film the whole clip at around the same time to avoid our previous mistake. We had to repeat the filming in the corridor and room because of the change in lighting and it was one of our main problems. We thought our filming had been completed but when we edited it down we released that there were many problems in continuity and lighting. There were also some problems with the filming and the main example of this is in one of our shots Davids head was cut out of the shot. When we tried to correct this we noticed we didn’t have enough footage so we had to reshoot the whole thing again. We ended up shooting the film three times before we had it right, we learnt from the mistakes we made and corrected them. In our final take we tried to film each scene as many times as possible and from different angles, this ensured that if something was wrong with our first clip we had backup.

When we had all the appropriate footage we then began to edit it on imovie 08.