Preliminary Task Evaluation

We filmed inside the classroom. We had a table, with a desk light, a gun, a £20 note and some substitute drugs on the table. A chair was placed next to the table, with one of our actors sitting on it. It worked very well for our task because ours was about drugs, and the room had brick walls and it looked very suitable for a drug user’s house.
When we filmed, we all took turns in filming, for example, I filmed all the mid shots, Leah filmed all the close-ups, Felix filmed all the wide shots, and Lukas filmed all the over the shoulder shots. I also helped when I was not filming by saying stand by, roll camera and action. This helped everyone else on set because I used appropriate terminology, making sure everyone knew was going on. When someone else was filming and someone else helping with the terminology I was in charge of the continuity. For example, when our male actor Ben came in the room, he hit the table, and the line of our substitute cocaine would move out of place, so at the end of every shot, I would go and re-line it, making sure it looks the same as before. This is very important because when we come to editing, everything has to look the same all the time. Otherwise It might jump from a mid shot to an over the shoulder shot and something is in a different place to the mid shot, it looks very amateur.


Lighting

For our lighting, we had all the room lights turned off. We had a hard light that was quite light and in a spot light form on our actress Saskia sitting on the chair. There was also a desk lamp turned on sitting on the table, pointing in Saskia’s direction. This lighting worked really well with our scene because, the hard light made Saskia’s shadow very sharp against the brick wall, it was very obvious in the scene. We made sure that the light was the same all the way through filming.

Filming

We set up the tripod, and placed the camera on in, making sure it was securely fit. I then turned on the camera, put it on the colour bar screen and filmed for about 15 seconds. I then turned it off colour bar and placed the camera were we filmed. We checked that the tripod was level by looking at the bubble making sure it was centre.
Before we filmed we asked the actors to come into screen, making sure that they would fit in the frame, i.e. no heads halfway out the frame. If either of the actors did come out of the frame, we re angled the camera and re took the shot.
Some of the angles we chose to film, were not very good because it had a very strong glare of the light, so before we filmed we checked, and if there was a glare, we changed the angle.
Our group was very concious of the 180 degree rule, everytime we changed the shot we would make sure that we were not over it, also checking props, lights and actors.