Prelim part 1

We were put into groups to begin with and given a storyboard to which our actors had to follow. It contained a simple script we decided to develop the story line so that our two actors were in a house living room, and the boy is trying to convince the girl to set these peoples house on fire even though she doesn’t want to.

We started by setting the actors up where we wanted them and then connecting the camera onto the tripod. Checking the camera was straight on the tripod. We then focused on the 180 degree rule thinking about not crossing it whilst we tried to achieve the necessary shots. To make sure we didn’t have a continuity slip we had to use a sticky note to label exactly where each actor needed to stand whist we filmed so that when we go to edit the film it all looks good and makes sense. We used wide shot’s, behind the shoulder shots moved the camera along the 180 degree line also changing the height to which we shot the characters. For the male actor who was playing the dominant character we used a low shot to make him appear in charge and important. Where as we shot the girl actress from a high angled shot this created an inferior look in which she appears small and innocent. We then tried a few shots using a handheld shot.

We found it very tricky when filming with the handheld shot as it’s extremely hard to keep it as still as possible and prevent it from looking to shaky and unbalanced. After re-taking a few shots we managed to hold the camera slightly differently and it did improve the quality of the shot. We also fell into a few problems whilst trying to focus in on the actor pre filming, It would appear on the screen fully zoomed in and focused but when the actor started moving around and we shot the scene it came out slightly blurry. To solve this we took more time to zoom in on the actors face making sure the focus was exactly right and this made a huge difference to the quality of our future shots.

I think next time we could be more clear when telling our actors where to stand, it took us a while to get them in the right spot and keep them from moving which did waste a bit of time which we will need to make good use of when filming our thriller shoot. I do also think for our thriller we should plan the shots we want to use ahead of the shoot as its tricky thinking of what shot to use next when on set and your actors are having to wait. In terms of actors we should think about when the script may get more complicated. In the future we should definitely try and give them a script to learn before hand as it will help speed up the time taken to film and we can save time retaking shots for other reasons rather then as the actor forgot their lines.