The Preliminary Exercise

Our first Mini-Project before The Exchange project was our preliminary exercise. We were given a task where we had to shoot a short film lasting approximately a minute. The shoot had to include a character walking into a room where a different character was currently sitting inside, the first character sits down next to or opposite the second character, a couple of lines of dialogue were exchanged and then the end. The reason we were set this task was to lead up to the Main Project that we are doing in January/February time, and because we are not experienced professional cameramen, we need to slowly do exercises to gain experience so that we know what techniques and skills, for example the “rule of thirds”, the “180 Degree Line Rule” and the “Shot/Reverse Shot”, to use whilst making our final project.

You can see from the short film that we adhered to most of the rules, the ones we did follow were the "180 Degree Line Rule" and the "Shot/Reverse Shot", we tried to follow the rule of thirds but whilst filming this wasn't going through my mind so i failed to follow the "Rule Of Thirds" on a couple of shots. On the other hand we did mange to follow the "180 Degree Line", we didnt cross the line during the shots, this is because if we had it would create an uneasy and confusing scene where both characters would look like they were in the same place. We also managed to follow the "shot/reverse shot", this creates action to keep the audience from yawning from bordom, this is also useful for dialogue between two people.

Our Story was that the first character (Muhaimin) walked into a room where the second character was sitting (Hannah) and Muhaimin sat down and dialogue was exchanged.

M : I Challenge You To A Staring Competition
H : Ok

*Pause Whilst Two Characters Are Staring At Each Other*
*Muhaimin Cant Stand The Pain And Reacts*

H : Yeh I Won!

The short film worked very well, the scenes flowed well, the dialogue went well. There were a couple of things that were pointed out that i didnt really notice at the time. Some of the scenes didnt cut to perfection, they were a few frames out, but this was also because we didnt have any more recording of that scene, this meant lack of handles. Lack of handles is a major problem as i found out, you cant get the scenes to cut together perfectly if you dont have handles, this made the scene just not that right and a bit uncomfortable. Scenes are meant to cut together so that you don't notice any editing whatsoever, but to achieve this handles are needed.

Another thing that was pointed out was the lack of shots, there weren't that many different angles only about 4/5, which doesn't make it very interesting if its the same continous angles. This means in our next Mini-Project, more shot angles are needed.

Thirdly there wasn't any close-ups, i suppose this isn't a neccesity but it would have been nice to see some close-ups to show expressions or moods.