Evaluation of the preliminary task

As I said in a previous journal I posted I and my group were set a preliminary task. We decided as a group to complete this task in short films and then edit them together to make it look like continuity. When we finally came to editing the footage we noticed a few problems that were unfortunately to obvious to deal with, leading us to make the choice to redo most of the footage.

To begin with the first mistake we identified was that when Jake was filmed walking down the stairs towards the door it is obvious that he made eye contact with the camera. The problem with this is it breaks realism to the audiences as it looks as though the action is being directed to them when in actual fact Jake was meant to act like the camera wasn’t there.

Another mistake we noticed was after Jake had walked across the room towards me and we had shook hands the footage stops therefore the movement of us beginning to take a seat is not filmed so when editing the shots of the handshake and the shot of us talking together the is no continuity due to the missing footage.

One of the aims of this task was to include a variety of shots one being shot/ reverse shot. We decided to use this shot when filming the dialogue between me and Jake, this meant that we would shoot me talking to Jake then record Jake talking to me. When looking back on the footage we noticed that the other person (the one not talking) cannot be seen in the shot whilst filming the person talking therefore I and my group will have to redo this filming to allow us to correct our mistakes. 

Furthermore another fault we noticed was in the final footage. During this clip I and Jake stand up to shake hands before he departs the room. Unfortunately there are two problems with this, one being the lighting. The footage is very light (natural lighting) throughout but when we both stand up the lighting seems to go very shadowy and dark so we are unable to see our faces.

The second problem is that our heads are cut off when we stand up to shake hands and also Jake's head is cut off when he walks across the room to leave.