Evaluation of Preliminary Excercise - Questions 3 & 4

3.What technology did you use to complete the task, and how did you use it?

During production we used various technical equipment to shoot our sequence. As the camera person, I had to use the mini DV camera, which had a hand-held microphone attached to the top of it and I used a tripod to stabilise the shots. We also had to use clapper boards with descriptions of the shot types and takes, and Mel, the sound technician used headphones that helped her to pick up any unwanted noise in the background.

In post-production, we used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit our sequence. We used non-linear editing, which meant that we were able to literally cut and paste the footage we wanted to use for our final piece. As I had never used this software before, I didn’t really want to be the one to edit our work, so Ben physically did the process while the rest of us contributed verbally. Firstly, we watched the entire footage we had gathered and selected the parts we thought would work well. From this we cut, using the razor tool, the sections that were shot well/acted out well and placed them onto a new timeline. We also cut and copied the audio track, to ensure its continuity. Once we had placed the chosen extracts together, we played the clip through the output monitor, to check for continuity, and that it made sense. There was a substantial amount of unwanted footage, thus our finished sequence was only 20 seconds long. We also had to add titles to our video so we used the tools on Premiere Pro to create the titles that appeared at the start of the clip. Later we added the fade out effects to both the titles and the end of the sequence, which made it flow smoothly.

4.What factors did you have to take into account when planning, shooting and editing?

The main factor we had to carefully consider was the amount of time we had in which to produce our sequence. We only had an hour for each section therefore we knew we had to be organised and not get too complicated whilst filming. Other major issues were of course the budget and location; we did not have a vast number of locations to choose from, and as for budget, we simply did not even consider spending money on our sequence – it would not make sense to spend money on a thirty second piece of film either. Finally, we had to make sure that our sequence matched and included the certain criteria specified in the brief. The task had to involve filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting opposite another character, with whom s/he exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. It had to demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and understanding of the 180-degree rule.