During this course we created a prelim and a film opening. Below is my edit of the prelim and the final cut of our film opening.
Brief of prelim
We were tasked with creating a continuity sequence that successfully demonstrated the 180º and 30º rules and match on action.
The purpose of this task was to:
- Practice using the equipment and software we were to use in our film openings.
- Find out what areas we needed practice in eg. did we know how to edit in Adobe Premiere Pro?
- Get us used to using continuity rules eg. match on action
- Prove we could successfully work in a team to create a film sequence
Brief of Film opening
We were tasked with creating a two minute opening for a British feature film.
We were required to use all of our learning from the prelim successfully e.g. obeying continuity rules and consider our audience, genre, narrative, style and form.
Pre-production of prelim
The first thing we decided was our genre; we made a comedy that seemed like a thriller at first and had a humorous ending.
We then decided exactly what would happen in our prelim i.e. a girl goes to investigate suspicious behaviour she sees through a window.
Using post-it notes we created a short storyboard, the purpose of this was to check that we had obeyed continuity rules.
Pre-production of Film Opening
Pre-production for our film opening took a lot longer because the opening was four times as long as the prelim.
We decided to make a teen, romantic comedy because it was a genre we knew a lot about. Also we knew that it was popular among 16-24 year olds, an audience category we are part of so would find easy to appeal to.
Because we were creating the opening for a feature film, the first thing we did was research. We researched:
• Similar films to ours: their target audiences, style, form and narrative
 |
| Scott Pilgrim Vs The World (2010) was one of the films we researched. It has a TA of 16-24 year old males, introduces characters straight away, has a distinctive comic book style and is about a young man trying to win a girl |
 |
| Oliver Tate (Submarine) was a character reference we used for Michael |
 |
| Eg. We found out that 16-24 year old males like to play video games, watched the Three Flavour Cornetto Trilogy films and went to the cinema every 2-3 months |
 |
| eg. We decided that Universal would be the best distributor for us because they had experience in marketing and exhibiting films in the same genre |
We then collated all this research into a pitch which we then presented to our teachers and peers.
 |
| Page 1 of our pitch handout |
 |
| Page 2 of the handout for our pitch |
When our research and idea had been approved we moved onto planning
Planning was when our learning from the prelim really helped.
We storyboarded using post it notes just as we had done in the prelim. This enabled us to spot any continuity mistakes such as no variety of shot types.
 |
| A section of our storyboard |
 |
| A page from our shootboard |
Production of prelim
Our prelim had to be planned, shot and edited in under an hour so we had a limited amount of time to get to grips with the equipment and create it.
We learnt:
- To work quickly under time constraints
- How to use the Canon Legria camera
- To work together as a team
- How to deal with external noise eg. planes and flute music
Production of Film Opening
Time was a lot less restricting in the production of our film opening, we had 3 weekends to shoot test footage, main footage and any additional footage we needed.
All of the skills we learnt on the prelim shoot were invaluable whilst shooting the film opening.
However, we were presented with new challenges which we overcame having practiced overcoming challenges during the prelim shoot:
Public place - we shot on the road outside Gavin's house which had pedestrians and cars going up and down it. We waited for them to pass before we pressed record and shot.
 |
| Shooting outside on the street |
Lighting - none of us had ever used a professional lighting kit before but we were given a tutorial on how to use it.
 |
| Alice adjusting the lights |
The purpose of our prelim was to practice using continuity techniques so our edit was very basic. We captured our footage into Adobe Premiere Pro, dragged it onto the timeline then cut it down.
We gained a basic knowledge of how to use Premiere Pro but didn't learn how to use some of the advanced skills needed for the film opening such as sound editing, grading and editing to music.
Our prelim has bad sound editing; there are jarring silences and background noise. We made sure that this would not happen in our opening sequence.
This is an audio version of our prelim, you can hear the mistakes we made:
Post-production of Film Opening
Learning the basic editing process during our prelim task meant that we were able to advance our post-production skills. It also meant we edited our opening faster.
The more advanced skills we learnt were grading with the Three-way Colour Corrector, soundtrack editing and balancing sound levels.
|
| The Three-way Colour Corrector |
Continuity Rules
We obeyed continuity rules in our prelim and used this knowledge in our film opening. Here's how:
180º Rule
 |
| 180º Rule in our prelim |
 |
| 180º Rule in our film opening |
30º Rule
 |
| 30º Rule in our prelim |
 |
| 30º Rule in our film opening |
Match on action
 |
| Match on action in our prelim |
 |
| Match on action in our film opening |
Shot Reverse Shot
 |
| Shot reverse shot in our prelim |
 |
| Shot reverse shot in our film opening |
Reflections
The prelim gave us the necessary disciplines and skills for making an opening sequence eg. obeying continuity rules. During our film opening we were able to build on these basic skills and develop new ones. It also saved time because in our film opening we were not making basic mistakes with sound and editing that we made in the prelim.
No comments:
Post a Comment