Preliminary Exercise Evaluation

According to the brief for our preliminary exercise we, as a group of four (Me, Harpal, Hargio and Samuel) had to create and produce a 30 second clip which included a character walking through a corridor, opening a door and there had to be an exchange of dialogue before the clip ended. 

Whilst filming the conversation we had to bear in mind that we must use an over the shoulder shot when exchanging the dialogue, whilst keeping the 180 degree rule in mind as well. Our first thought on the exercise, was that we needed to start off with a genre before deciding the setting and the dialogue. As a group of four including myself, we pitched an idea based on the genre of what we think the preliminary exercise should be. Eventually, in terms of genre we decided to go with a hybrid of romantic/drama as it would appeal to the 15-35 demographic audience.

Once the genre on this exercise was decided, we drew up a storyboard which included all the different types of shots which we were thinking about to take forward, the narrative of the film, the actions/expressions which we were to do and the dialogue which was to be said. In addition to this, the length of each shot was included so that we knew how long the overall clip was roughly going to take up so that if it was under over 30 seconds, we could edit the clip slightly to fill the overall duration. The shot list that we made, helped a lot as well as the story board as it also gave us an idea of how the overall clip would turn out to be.

Throughout the whole of the clip my favourite part was the extreme close up shot of the male character's eyes and his eye lids closing, although we unintentionally broke the 180 degree rule. However, the close up of the eyes connoted various things. The extreme close up is very effective as it releases more emotions and senses of the character making the audience feel engaged. The connotations of eye lid closing are sadness, unhappy, heartbroken etc. Although the audience does not specifically know what’s happened, they are able to work it out due to these enigma codes. There’s no dialogue in this shot and this engages the audience and have sympathy for the male character.

In terms of the pre-production side of things, I’d have liked to create some more detailed storyboards, in order to show the idea’s and processes which went through our minds whilst preparing to film. Another factor which I’ll take into consideration when making the final real production, would be choosing an appropriate setting as Costa (canteen) was a decent setting for a romantic drama however, I felt that the fact that it wasn't a realistic coffee shop where you could drink coffee in peace but it was the canteen. Also, the audio sound quality was terrible as we had cleaners in the background speaking and moving tables therefore disrupting our filming and made it hard for the dialogue to be heard by peers.

Overall I think we did a decent job of the preliminary exercise however there were a lot of things which we could do differently in the future in order to make our real 2 minute production much better. In terms of the editing, it was done very well. The cuts were on time, great continuity editing which made it more realistic and the clip seemed to flow quite well. When creating the final production for the media coursework, I’m going to take the factors listed above into consideration in order to ensure that it’s even better than what we produced for the preliminary exercise.