Prelim- Planning,filming and editing

Premliminary Thriller - 'The Stuff'

The brief :

Produce a continuity clip involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges 4 lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse ,shot and the 180-degree rule.

Planning:

In order to commence the planning of my group's thriller clip, we decided to brainstorm initial ideas that we all had which could then be developed into a clear narrative. The members of my group were Ed, Oli, and Hannah who utilised their knowledge of thriller openings to generate narrative ideas for the video. After deliberation of basic narrative, my group decided to use a mind-map format to confirm roles,location and camera shot types.

 We then developed our planning by producing a script to devise character roles and dialogue. To sum up the process of our first planning session, we had finalised ambiguous narrative that explores the exchange of an unknown object between the main characters played by Oli and Ed. The characters are not clearly depicted as protagonists or antagonists as this creates a sense of ambiguity thus grabbing the audience attention from the opening. 

The ambiguity is also created through the running title of 'The Stuff' which myself and the group decided would be an interesting take on the conventional thriller opening. Below are pictures of ,my group's planning documents. We drew up a storyboard as a group to illustrate each scene found in our film, the storyboard includes shot types and audio as it was then clear to everyone what they had to do during filming and editing. 

Though the plot includes many ambiguous aspects it becomes obvious of the characters and their position during the scene, after every detail of the narrative, filming and editing plan was completed we decided to commence filming.

Filming:

After producing some props needed for the scene we decided to move around our filming location (the studio) into our decided layout. After deciding on lighting and filming our establishing shot of Oli walking through the door of the 'office' we began to consult our planning documents to ensure the filming process could run smoothly. 

Hannah and I were in charge of camera and dressing the set, I filmed the majority of the scenes as this made sure our camera angles were varied but took on a continuity format. We did encounter various problems when using the set and attempted to fix these at the early stages of filming. 

It took around an hour to complete the filming of all scenes which led us to the editing process. Below are some images of the filming process. 

Editing:

During the editing process we decided to split into two groups which would ensure time was managed well, Ed and Oli were enlisted to find suitable audio for the shots that did not include dialogue. Hannah and I immediately focused on editing the footage including transitions and titles. 

Even though I feel everyone played a sufficient part in the filming and planning of the preliminary video editing felt somewhat detached. Though having Oli and Ed finding audio was good for time management I believe we could have shared editing input more, we ran drafts past them but it would have been more helpful for everyone if they could have taken part in core edits. 

This is useful to know for the filming of my video that I will complete in the near future. The final edit was finished in good time and uploaded to youtube on the final allotted editing lesson. Below is an image of myself during the editing process.