Evaluation of Preliminary Task

Evaluation

We were set the task of creating a preliminary piece. The piece had to show a person entering a room and conversing with a second person. It had to be less than 2 minutes long and include the 180o rule, match on action and shot reverse shot. We decided to use a job interview as the situation as this would be fairly straight forward to film and would allow us to include all of the criteria requested.
We began creating a very short script for the piece. Initially our script was quite complex but we ended up discarding it as it would take up to much of the filming time and lost focus. We only needed about 2 minutes of filming so no more dialogue than a couple of lines for each character were necessary. The script involved some mild humour which was executed well by Grace by her use of facial expressions and body language in filming. We all agreed as a group that this script was suitable for the task and didn’t come across any major problems in writing it.
When storyboarding, initially we were very ambitious with what we wanted to create but were advised by our teacher to keep it simple and concentrate more on getting all the criteria in. So we simplified our storyboard. We planned to incorporate the 180o rule, match on action and shot reverse shot, we each had our own storyboard which was helpful in case any of our group were absent from a lesson but luckily no one was. We all contributed towards and agreed on the content in the storyboard.
We did however have to alter our first storyboard due to problems when filming. We had filmed some of the content but were restricted from improving it as the location we had decided upon became unavailable for further filming. Luckily, this worked to our advantage as we were able to secure a better location for filming. The new location was a teacher’s office so had all the props that would make our job interview storyline more realistic. We re-did our storyboard and second time around it went almost perfectly. When it came to filming we did shoot every scene exactly as it was on the storyboard. However, we did have some trouble with the tracking shot as the room was very small so we had to do a number of takes to get both characters in the frame. The actors who played the characters in our piece were members of our group so we knew that we wouldn’t have any problems with reliability, the standard of acting they gave and how professional they were when filming.
We experienced some technical difficulties with uploading our content onto the macs which was very frustrating as we knew how we wanted to edit the shots and that it would not take a considerable amount of time to do so. After hours of attempts on several machines with different cameras we were finally able to upload the filming and begin editing. Editing went as predicted; we knew what we wanted to do and stuck to the storyboard. We only omitted two shots because they reduced the flow of the piece, these were the close-up of the door handle as Rachel (who played the interviewee) opened the door and the medium long shot of the door as she approached it.
Although we kept the piece simple I feel it did meet all the criteria and was fairly professional looking. It would have been nice to include some more impressive media skills as I feel this would make our piece more entertaining but the use of mild comedy made up for this. There was one thing we were disappointed about and that was the costume. We didn’t premeditate costume and therefore both characters were dressed casually which is not what you would expect of a interviewer or interviewee, so this reduced the realism of the piece. Therefore if we were to do this piece again we would involve some character designs as part of our plan. I also feel that we could include more shots to make the piece more interesting. Despite this the piece did meet the criteria and turned out exactly as we had planned so I am happy with the end result, I think we work well as a team and there were very few disagreements when making decisions about the piece.