Evaluating our preliminary task

For our preliminary task, we were asked to create a short film of a character walking into a room, having a short conversation, and then leaving the room. The sequence had to include match on action and shot-reverse-shot and it had to observe the 180 degree rule.

My role in our group was as the director and cameraman. For this I had to make sure that all of the shots were framed well and that they made sense so that they could be edited together to create a coherent narrative.

We succeeded in a number of instances of match on action, editing shots so that the transitions coincided with one of the characters performing an action. We did this by cutting between different camera angles as a character walked through a series of doors.

Our shot-reverse-shot was less successful as we only had one instance of the two characters being the focus of the shot, so we only had a shot-reverse. If we were to do this task again, we would have put in a second shot over Amy’s shoulder showing Tim’s reaction to her behaviour.

We observed the 180 degree rule as the camera did not ‘cross the line’ during the conversation between Tim and Amy.

Overall, I was happy with the final result of our preliminary task as we succeeded in carrying out our brief and the cinematography and editing of the sequence made it look more professional by controlling what was in the frame of the camera and removing elements that we thought were detrimental to the quality of the film.