Preliminary Task

What was the preliminary task?

The preliminary task that was given was involving to work within our production groups, (In this case, consisting of me and Bianca) and within the group, to plan, then record, and then edit a small one minute sequence of recording to just demonstrate our understanding of both equipment and our skills with certain mirco-elements such as cinematography.

Upon recieving our task, our first step was to plan a narrative, which then followed up to what locations and settings we will be using. There was no specific aim given for the task aside from showing our understanding and recording for at least 1 minute in total, we were; however. Limited to just the school premises, our options were limited in terms of locations. This did however easily narrow it down to recording within the school building.
Before being more precise on where exactly in the building we will be recording in. (such as a specific room, etc) We first had to build up a simple and small narrative that would give us roughly one minute of footage in the first place.
After a lengthy discussion and on the fact that this is just a one minute task, we created a small narrative to now use for our task. This being that a man (me as the actor for the character) will be making his way down to the libary, and will then ask someone for a book. During the small journey to the libary, this is where we will demonstrate our understanding of cinematography elements, such as close ups, pannings, etc.

Now that we have created a basic narrative to follow and how to show at least a rough understanding. We now start to decide on our locations within the building to demonstrate these different shot angles and cinematography techniques. For the locations within the building for the travel path to the libary, we picked the long, narrow corridoors as this gives the character who will be walking down the middle, with the camera focused on him as he walks closer a very powerful and dominate feeling to the audience. It can also be related to a slightly fear feeling if the corridoors are empty (the feeling of isolation aside from the one character in the area). We picked a corridoor as the main travel path as it gives the audience no other points of interest to focus on aside from the character walking down the corridoor.

After the corridoor scenes, we then will be focusing on entering the libary, where a close up of the character's hand as he places it on the handle and then pushes open the door. To the audience, it can give curiosity as it does not show the full picture; or in short. They can not guess that it is a libary the character is entering as there is no hints to it, such as books, desks, etc).

Then when the character enters the libary, the camera will be shortly following from behind the character as he walks to the table with a friend who currently has the book that the character wishes to ask for back. As the character approaches the friend and asks for the book, a few straight cuts and shot-reverse-shot is used between the short converstation as the character asks for the book. Upon recieving the book, he then opens it shortly, as he does this the camera goes into an extreme close up of the book and then as the character closes it, it goes back to a mid-shot of the character and the friend at the table, with the character walking off the screen to the right side.

After our locations and narrative are decided, we then gathered our equipment, which featured of just a video camera and a tripod. The tripod would greatly aid us in static camera scenes, or where the camera would be fixed in place and then used to pan across as the character walks by the camera in the corridoor as this reduces the amount of shaking when the camera is being used.

With our equipment and our ideas ready and in place, we begun shooting our film and after we gathered our footage, we headed back to class for a debrief and to gather up our total footage and started to work on editing.
Editing mostly consisted of smoothing our transitions between scenes by adding a very short dissolve so the two scenes blend in more smoother. We also moved clips around, for example, during the planned shot-reverse-shot while the exchange of dialog was taking place in the libary between the character and the friend.

Reflection:
Once we completed our preliminary task, I believe that it was helpful in allowing us to understand what is required as a baseline to be used within films, and in terms of aiding us more precisely for our Thriller task. We believe that gaining an understanding in the use of cinematography, such as using a close up to hide certain parts of a scene on purpose to confuse the audience or to hide what can hint will happen in the next scene, can have certain wanted effects from the audience of our film. A general understanding in both how to use the editing program as well as the equipment, such as being able to set up a camera mounted on a tripod to remove shaking when recording helps as well towards our main task so that it appeals more to the audience.

We encoutnered some problems along the way with our preliminary task, which in turn allowed us to understand what difficulties to expect when planning for such a task in the future. The main problem was our location and how open and populated it was, as orginally we hoped for an empty corridoor, but majorty of the time other people were crowding around. But on the other hand, we are happy that we found work arounds, such as simply walking down the corridoor and recording at a later time, or trying another nearby corridoor, and then using the editing program to smoothly blend the two different scenes together to make them appear as if they are linked as one whole scene.