Preliminary task evaluation

For our preliminary task, we had to create a short film with just a few lines of dialogue. Someone would have to enter the room and with another character and say the dialogue. Our genre for this short film was a ’spoof’ about a woman (me) being followed by a stranger. a young man/ teenager(Robbie Kuhn). The woman misreads this as him stalking her but in fact he is just trying to give her phone she dropped.

We had to plan out the mise-en-scene (location, props, costume) for the costume we decided to have the stranger wear a hoodie because that way you don’t see all his face at the start to make the audience nervous but also the other character, also we decided to have a hoodie because the character is a young adult/ teenager and so we based it on a stereotypical teenager, they often wear hoodies. For the woman we decided to have her wear originally a dress but decided that would make the character seem younger in age also we had a problem with continuity so just decided to create a whole new outfit to jeans, top and high-heeled shoes. The location was a problem with planning also, it was difficult trying to find a quiet place to shoot the footage, originally we were going to film in the sixth form block at Sewell park college but then changed to the hallway in Sewell park college and entered a cookery room. We only used a few props in the footage, which was a mobile phone and table and chairs.

The equipment we used for recording the footage was simply a camera and tripod so it was easy to manage. We did include many shots, we did include shot reverse shot and 180 degree shot, we also used a low, medium and high shot. When film editing we had to cut a lot of the footage and we re-arranged some of the cuts and we cut out all the footage that was not useful to us. Then I edited the colour to black and white colour because we wanted it to seem fictional and then turn into reality by changing the colour back to original colour at the end, I also used a video transition to change it from one colour to the other. I used this transition because we wanted to make it obvious we had edited it. I decided to change the volume of the footage because of sound in the background, that was a problem and we could learn from this problem, we should have found a more quiet location, we made the volume loud when the two actors ran and during the dialogue because it is important to have the digetic sound. We added music (non-digetic sound) to build the tension to the film but also to fill in the clips without sound, the music we used was called The Pouncer by Christopher Salvski.

Our aim was to get a reaction out of the audience, at the start of the film our aim was to get the audience anticipated about what the film is about and what is going to happen and when the stranger is following the woman we wanted the audience to get nervous. Finally we wanted the audience to have to be relieved but find the end of the film funny because there is a comedy ending. I am mainly confident we have achieved at least a few of these reactions from the audience.

Health and safety is important when filming, so it does not endanger film crew or the actors. When filming the running down the hallway scene, we made sure there was nothing on the floor that could endanger the actors (me and Robbie Kuhn) and the group so when running no one would fall over while running.

Managing human resources was mainly fine, when filming everyone was part of the production, each person got to film, act or make decisions about filming for example when we would use certain shots. When editing, each person got to do editing because we wanted everyone to have experience with editing, not just filming.

Overall the preliminary task had a few problems but we managed to overcome these problems and finish the task.