AS
MEDIA BLOG
For the preliminary exercise, I was put in a group with Ollie and Max. I didn't have a great deal of experience in media, having only taken the subject for GCSE and missing a year of it, and so filming was harder for me than others. We were told by the exam board to film the opening 2 minutes to a thriller, and so we decided to go for something a little out of the ordinary. The concept was that we would have several characters in the film, but that they would all be the same person (Myself). We knew that this would be challenging to pull off, but that it would be a good opportunity to experiment with different shots. I was responsible for the acting as well as the storyboard, Ollie was responsible for the filming and editing, and Max was responsible for sound.
Surveillance
I first suggested the idea, and we went outside to look around the school to get ideas on where we should film. We came up with the idea of this corridor shot. When we got feedback from the other groups, we were told that this was one of the best parts of the film. The idea was that there would be three people standing in the corridor, and when the camera would turn around to look at each of them, the audience would see that they are all the same person. This was done by cutting the clips when the camera went past the first character, moving from position to position was hard and repetitive because if I made one mistake in position or if the camera moved slightly we had to redo the shot, eventually we ran out of time and had to go with the best shot available. One of the things i was not happy with is the bump at the end of the corridor shot. This had to be included because it was the only shot with smooth transitions from person to person. We also hadnt considered the length of the shot, due to the abnormal length we had to include other shots just to shortern the length of the corridor shot.
In this shot we had to use the back of Max's head to represent me in the foreground, with myself being in the background. I liked this shot because it gave the audience a clear idea that every character was the same. However I felt as though this scene could have been enhanced by finding a better person to be in the foreground, this is because the hair doesnt quite look as realistic as it potentially could be.
Evaluation
We showed our preliminary project to the class, we got great feedback but a few negative comments. One of the main things we have to work on is character development because although the majority of the class new who each character is it took them a few minutes to get use to the idea. The problem we had was a limited amount of time, our project was by far the longest in the class it still wasnt enough time to fully develop each character.
Preparation
For the preliminary exercise we where put into groups of 3, my group was Oli Pilcher, Max Hall and myself. I thoroughly enjoyed working with this group of people, I feel as though we all bounced ideas off each other in a very constructive way. We all seized roles within the first lesson, I took the acting position, Max took main camera man and Oli took the producer/director position. This preliminary exercise really gave us a chance to experience what it is like to make a small production, personally I found that acting in our small production gave me the confidence to act in my main performance. The idea we came up with was a psychological thriller in which every person looks identical. The problem we had was differentiating characters, when we first filmed it looked as though the mise-en-scene was wrong and wasnt intentional, after a bit of experience we managed to establish characters and it looked more intentional.