Our task for today was to do a set preliminary task where we were to film and edit someone walking into and across a room, sitting down and having a conversation with another person. This was to get us used to the cameras, editing software and get us to use as many types of shot as possible to create an effective film with continuity. We got into groups of 3 or 4 and discussed ideas.
We started off by drawing up a story board of all the frames we were going to use. We decided to start off with a big close-up showing the handle of a door opening. We then decided that the next shot would be a medium long shot from the outside of the room showing opening the door, followed by a pan of the person walking diagonally across the room to the chair (from the front, filmed from inside the room). The aim was to get the back of the character while she is walking to the chair in a medium shot but would progress into a long shot when the character reaches the chair. We then see the character sit down in an over the shoulder shot from behind the other character. We then decided to film a shot-reverse-shot using over the shoulder shots for the conversation.
It was the first time I've used a professional camera to film something. Initially I was actually really scared to break it if I pressed the wrong buttons but when I learned how to use everything i found it quite easy to understand even though it looked quite confusing. The only thing it took a while to get used to was to wait 5 seconds of recording before we started carrying out the shot. It was very enjoyable to learn how to use everything.
We found a suitable room to use for the filming with good lighting and enough space. The filming went really well because our group got along really well - we listened to each others ideas and gave opinions about what we decided on and how the shots looked. We worked quite quickly but carefully concentrating most on continuity - thinking about how good the shots would look when edited together. We came up with a very simple script like a general conversation which was easy to remember so we spent more time on the filming aspect rather than the acting or remembering what to say. We did more than one take of everything just in case something doesn't work well in the editing process.
When we began filming and got into the room we altered a few of the shots from our storyboard and changed around the order slightly to make it flow better. We added shots as well.
In conclusion, I think the filming was very successful and has prepared us well to create our thriller openings. I am looking forward to editing everything next lesson and seeing if it all works together.
Editing Stage
In this lesson we edited our videos. We used the software Final Cut Pro. It was quite confusing at first but I got used to it quickly because of instruction from our teacher and I found that some aspects of it were similar to software I had used previously like Windows Movie Maker. It was quite confusing to set it up properly also because there was something wrong with our computer.
When we got everything sorted out we began to edit our video. Firstly, we cut our shots and named them. Because we did more than one take of most shots we labelled them using the colour coding so we knew which was the best shot when we were putting them together, this was very helpful. We used our story board from last lesson to help us with the order of the shots.
We learned how to mark in and mark out shots and put them together on the timeline. I found it very interesting how precise you had to be with continuity because if you mark a tiny bit too early or late it is very obvious. It took a while to achieve a seamless flow of action in some shots but we mananged it in the end. We also took away some of the shots for example the one showing the feet walking.
Overall I really enjoyed the lesson. I learned a lot more about how to use macs and Final Cut Pro. My group got along really well with each other and we were able to get our editing done quickly and successfully.
Final Product
Prelim Task User4 from BDC on Vimeo.
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