EVALUATION

INTRODUCTION

Our brief was to create a short media artefact as a group of 3 in order to effectively and practically demonstrate our understanding of continuity techniques and when they’re used.

So we were given a task to come up with a short media piece about a Detective meeting up with an informant and conversing about any information of our choice as long as it suited what we were doing and the basic outline of the story we were given.

We were split into groups of 3 to create the short movie example of continuity techniques.

The continuity techniques we had to include in our demonstration were:

-     - The “SHOT REVERSE SHOT”

-     - MATCH ON ACTION

-     - The 180 “DEGREE RULE”

-     - Some dialogue between the two characters

      All of these techniques has to be used correctly in order to assure our understanding of continuity techniques and the effects created by using them in a scene.

THE CHALLENGES

As good as the outcome was in the end, we did however face a number of problems during the production process in general which had really slowed down our progress and risked the completion of our media artefact.

PRE-PRODUCTION

In pre-production, the first problem was the planning of what shot to include and how we would show them in a specific way to create some sort of cinematic effect and would demonstrate good use of cinematography and continuity techniques. Also, there was the problem of the people in my team in this  having to find themselves being often distracted by other groups and not focusing much on the planning of the task. Furthermore, there was a real lack of focus within my group and it had seemed that I had taken it a bit more seriously then them, but however they did contribute, but not in a wayI would be expecting them to, and i mean buy presenting ideas on props,setting and costume.

In general, the group's attention as a whole was not the best and could have been much better if we had put in much more effort into the planning and importantly communication & teamwork.

Also, we had to be able to plan our filming in the space of just one lesson period so that was challenging presuming we had those issues occurring quite often, so we were against time. That however was quite luckily not much of a major setback for us at all but just put us under pressure as we had filming the next lesson.

Next was the storyboard, I had came up with the storyboard and it had featured a series of different shots to demonstrate good use of cinematography, however. it turned out to have too many shots and was rather complicated.

Because I was the only one to create that storyboard, it was a major setback because on the day of the filming, not only did no one else had produced a storyboard, was set for them to do, but we had to very quickly create a brand new storyboard that would be kept simple and only had a small number of shots. This had therefore taken up about 10 minutes of our filming time and had been done in a hurry which had made it not well pre-meditated, but that however managed to be turned into a really good piece of practical film work so it all worked out. 

However, it was a really major setback for the group.

Next was the matter of organising the props and the setting where our scene was going to be shot, the props were all thought of at the end of the time of planning the storyboard and shots, which was good because we would be more likely to remember them for the actual day. However, that theory turned out to be incorrect and they, the two actors in our group had completely forgot to bring the costumes we had planned to carry which had therefore made our scene less mysterious and noir-like as we wanted to make it. Gladly, the outcome did not look so bad as the clothes they were wearing turned out to be not so inappropriate for the scene so that was a relief for us. 

However, with the group's not so efficient organisational skills, the scene did not luckily require props, or we would be in some real trouble...

Finally was the setting, the setting that the scene was shot in was an appropriate place to shoot, but at the same time, not the smartest choice of setting as the room we filmed in was in the Music Department which had therefore meant we would be expecting some really heavy noise coming from the other rooms. Luckily, we did not get much of that, but children going up and down the staircases screaming and shouting was quite the 'spanner in the works' for us. So every time we had to wait until there were no more screaming children running past.

PRODUCTION