Preliminary Task - Miss Miller

In our group there is me Charlie Stewart, Jessica Day and Ryan Samuels. For this task we had to film a conversation that could be about anything. The whole idea of this task was to allow us to get used to the equipment and camera before we started to film our own thriller film's opening sequence, this meant we needed to understand how the tripod would allow us to create different angles for our film. We were given a set of shots that must be embedded into the conversation like a long shot and a closeup, therefore allowing us to get familiar with the equipment. After the filming was done we had to all work together to make sure the conversation looked realistic, so we all watched the film as a group and then decided which scenes were good and which were bad, we then edited the good ones together which made it seem like a normal conversation. Finally we watched it back to see if it was good, after that, we uploaded it to YouTube.

We were given a list of camera movements and shots that we had to do in this task. We had to do one close up, one long shot, perform a shot reverse shot and a tracking shot, we had trouble with the tracking shot so we decided that it should track one of us as we walk over to the other, the location we picked made it hard to do this as we were relying heavily on signals and when I should have left the building, we overcame this problem as it was a simple shot and didn't go on for that long. The close up and the tracking shot got us more familiar with the tripod's controls as we needed to twist certain attachments in order to make it more fluid to move, this was mostly used for the tracking shot going right to left this shot was at the beginning of the sequence we also managed to get the long shot as well so we were efficient with our time, the close up was facing down so this allowed us to get familiar with adjusting the angles, this was near the end when Ryan gets out his phone. One of the last shots that was a challenge at first was the shot reverse shot with me and Ryan when we are talking  I think our group were also very efficient and quick when it came to the filming as we were done quite quickly, Jess was a good director as she was quick at learning what all the functions of the camera and what it allowed us to do, she was very open to suggestions of different shots as we were a group so we worked well together in this task. We were concentrated before as we didn't think we would be able to achieve this task in time, we were distracted for quite a bit as it was very cold outside which may have made our filming skills seem rushed but I ensured that we took our time to make the shots better by asking Jess to re shoot a couple so we had a choice of shots to select from. Another struggle was working out what button did what on the camera, we had not worked with the cameras before so working out what did what was quite hard at first, but as we got to the location we then let Jess get used to the camera and she started to push buttons to see what they did. To avoid this when we do our own thriller opening sequence we will learn what all the buttons do before we start filming so that we know what to do at all times. Something that has helped us produce an opening sequence out of this task would be that we are now experienced with the equipment that we have used to do this task and knowing that it will be the same equipment that we're using is quite a reassuring fact as we will be experienced with the equipment. One of the last problems was that there was background noise that the camera was picking up for quite a while so we had to wait for the noise to stop so we could continue filming, to avoid this for our film we have chose to film it at quite an isolated location.

In conclusion, as the task allowed us to experience the equipment we will be using first hand, it eases our stresses as when we start to actually film the technology won't be new to us which will allow us to set up quickly and with ease, this then means we can get our shots quickly and edit them as soon as possible therefore leading to the finished piece of work for our film. We learnt what it is like to actually film a short sequence and has given us that experience. I think when our group does come round to filming the thriller we should keep the concentration to how it was for this task and film it in chronological order like we did for this task so it is easier to edit later. One thing I would do differently is work out how to delete videos or scenes that are not up to standard right there in the filming stage. In all, we learnt about the work that goes in to shooting a film by getting first hand experience but we have also learnt that efficiency is the most important when filming and that our group can be quite efficient when we need to be.