Preliminary Task Evaluation

Planning

• ·         During the planning process we looked at previous AS Media preliminary tasks for inspiration, and as a group we liked the spy theme and decided to adapt it.
• ·         With limited time, and having several ideas for a storyline we came up with the idea of having a transaction of goods and money commonly seen in the spy genre. The transaction would involve a fraud and a victim.
• ·         We decided that the props would need to be something that we could easily get hold of. Therefore, we came up with the idea of having a teddy bear, after seeing one being used in a previous AS media preliminary task, and a bag stuffed with a blazer to act as the goods.

Storyboard

Having many different ideas it took us a while to come up with a final idea and we decided other minor details could be decided on the day of filming. Our story board (as seen above) would be used to make sure we knew what we had to do the next day when we started filming. The story board had to be clear, concise and we also added the details of the shots we wanted in each scene. Mindi decided that she would bring in her bear and Xena would bring in her camera.

We came up with the name ‘Taken’ by looking at our storyline, a bear being taken, and making it short so that it would not give away too many details of what the video would be about.

Filming

1. On the day we decided that Xena and Mindi would be the actors and also help to decide where the camera would be set up for each shot. Whilst Zayanah and I filmed each shot and set up the camera.

Using the storyboard we were able to set the scene quickly due to only having a limited time for filming. We originally wanted to start with an establishing shot as drawn on the storyboard however we thought that an over the shoulder shot would be more practical due to the different heights of the tables and chairs. Therefore, we used shot reverse shot. These shots were all within the 180 degree rule. We added in some extra camera angles and speech to make sure the storyline was clear.

2. This shot shows Mindi walking across the corridor. We originally wanted to do a long shot however due to the corridor not being wide enough we were unable to do this so used a middle shot instead. We shot the midshot from the front and behind to give two perspectives.

3. Using several shot-reverse-shots made the scene more dramatic as the realisation of getting a fake bear sinks in. The extreme close up of the bear allows the audience to distinguish between the fake and real bear (different ribbons) later on in the video.

As we liked the tilt used before at the beginning of the video we decided to add in another tilt as Mindi drops the fake bear on the floor and runs off. In addition to this we tried to add in a tracking shot of Mindi running to trial what it would look like if we decided to add it into our final project. We found that it was effective however did not look professional as the camera shook a bit too much.

4. In this scene we used match on action as Mindi opened the door. However, we had some continuity errors as in one shot someone’s head can be seen through the door window. We could have filmed some additional shots of Mindi opening the door as the match on action was not entirely smooth in our final video. We did not include the over the shoulder shot as we thought it would be more dramatic to just show Mindi slamming the door open.

5. Having not used over-the-shoulder shot yet we decided to add it in here to show Mindi and Xena having a conversation. We had some issues with the focus as the camera focused on Mindi’s shoulder instead of Xena. If we could repeat it next time we would make sure it was in focus before we filmed.

     

6. Using a long shot meant we could see the bear falling out of the window. We initially wanted to film the bear falling directly towards the camera but there were bushes beneath the window making it hard to set up the camera there.

Editing

We used Final Cut Pro to edit our final video. None of our group had used this programme before but we were able to get the hang of it and managed to edit the video to how we wanted it. We added music and titles to improve our final piece. We had to cut a few clips to make sure we didn't linger on any bits for too long whilst cutting out any unwanted parts. The end of the video fades to black to show that the bear died after falling from the window. The editing timeline is shown below.

If we could do this again I would have liked to have tried adding different filters or voiceovers. 

This is our finished video: