Film- Preliminary

Our task was to film somebody opening a door, walking across the room, another character being introduced and a small amount of dialogue. We achieved this in our film, and we had a narrative about two slightly sinister teachers who want to get a student expelled because of his bad report. Our story board displays the shots in which we used, including zoom, over the shoulder shot, close up and mid shot.



We mostly stuck to our story board but we kept adding things in or taking things out and tweaking to make it better and more professional. We began with an establishing shot of the door and then slowly zooming in as a hand reached to open it. Another establishing shot was used as the door was opened, from the other side. We then used another establishing shot for recognition of the 2nd character, the 1st character walked into the room during the shot,I think the shot would have worked better if we had used a pan shot as we had planned in our story board, but the continuity between shots works well. A pan shot was used as one teacher handed the report to another and then an over the shoulder shot. We did a close up of the school report but around this point the continuity was a little iffy. We then used over the shoulder shots using the 180 degree rule whilst dialogue was exchanged. I think the 180 degree rule works well although once again our continuity could be improved, and we should have been more accurate with the characters positions when editing/filming. We then used a pan shot after the character said "out" and filmed out of the window zooming in on what was outside. We sped up and slowed down the pace of the zoom which we felt added a mysterious/scary twist, and may make the audience anxious, as it went well with the mysterious sound effect.
We filmed the scene a few times and then edited different parts together to get the continuity right. There was some discontiniuty with our props e.g the umbrella which was mainly for humour purposes. We used an effect with the film to give it a higher contrast and edited in the sound of a school bell to indicate to the audience that it is break time at a school, coupled with the food we used in the scene, to add to break time mise en scene. When the door is being opened at the beginning of the scene, we edited in a creak to set the mysterious and slightly sinister mood. We also used sound effects towards the end of the film, which was not on our storyboard, we added mysterious music as the camera zoomed in out of the window, we thought this would be effective as it would make the audience think and set an intense mood about what the teachers plan to do to the student.
During our task I have learnt about how important it is to get the continuity between shots and positions of actors etc completely right. At the beginning of our film, I think the continuity is good but towards the end it gets worse. Given another chance, I would have taken more time and detail getting these things right in our filming so that it looked more professional.