Understanding Basic Rules (Short Opening Sequence - 16 Novermber)

Understanding Basic Rules

Introduction:

In my group there are three members including me. The other two members were Tom and Jake. She reason why I had chose this group was because the other members in the group lived local and we knew that there would be a point where we would have to do work outside college, therefore it would be easy to meet up.

We were given a task to make a short clip about one to two minutes long. In this clip it had to show that we understood some basic rules of filming. These rules and tasks were the following:

- Be able to use a camera and tripod

- Different type of Camera angles

- Match on action (Rule)

- Reverse shot (Rule)

- 180° (Rule)

Brief Discriptions of the Rules:

Match on action - Is where a action is taking place, but except for taking the one camera shot. Two or more can take place for the one action. For example the first shot would be a character lighting up a match, then the second shot would be the character putting the match towards his cigarette. This gives is a better and continuous effect.

Reverse shot - This rule can be used when two characters are having a conversation. For example when one person speaks, the camera would be looking towards him but behind the person he is speaking to. This allows the veiwers to see who he is speaking to. Then when the other person speaks, the camera would go to the other side. This is a useful and prevents the viewers getting bored.

180° - Could occur when there are two characters having a conversation. The way this works is preety simple. If you were to image a line going through the characters. This helps as a guidline to avoid breaking this rule. Then when recording the characters, you can only stay on one side of the line throughout the whole scene. If you were to break this rule, it would seem if the character was jumping in different places which would result so confusing the audience.

What Went Well in Our Task:

In the group the other two members never had hand to hand experience with using the camera, were as I had a year experience when i did my level 1 Btec in Media. Therefore they decided to let me do the camera work and the other two did the acting. Three members was just right to get this task done. We had showed our understanding of the the rules well in the film used many different camera shots such as long shot, mid shot, mid close-up and close-up. We even panned and tilted the camera in some shots. Now we have completed this task and did have many ups and downs but we still got result at the end.

What Went Bad in Our Task:

There were many things that went wrong in our task. The main reasons for this is because of our group getting the tapes to record on late. This was my mistake and hopefully this won't happen again. The other problems we came across was that we had done some practice shots and recorded them so we knew how it would come out like. But when we play it back on the camera, it messes up the shots which had old bits coming onto the final piece. Therefore we had to erase the whole thing and start from the beggining. We could not edit this because there was no time to take it to the editting rooms and also the quality of the camera the college had given us were not the best around and the editing facility on it was preety poor.

How Can We Improve This:

If I was to do this task again, I would make the group more organised therefore no time would be wasted. We could also use my own camera which would have better quality and easier edditing facility. And next time we would need to rehearse more to get it spot on. But overall the main bits that went down was the software and facilities, but as a group we fully understood the basic rules and had demonstrated it well in our filming. And as they say, you can only learn from your mistakes to get better at anything.