Shooting a preliminary task

Now that I understood how to use and set-up the video cameras, I could take on a practical task of shooting a basic scene. I was given a storyboard and had to film the same shots that the board portrayed.

The scene involved two actors.

• Person A walks into the room.
• We are then introduced to person B who has been waiting in the room for A.
• There is some dialogue between the two.
• Person A then exits and leaves person B in room.

How did we shoot the scene?

My group and I shot the scene in a studio and thought about the use of lighting, props and positioning of camera angles.

We set-up the studio with a desk, which person B sits behind. Person A later leans over the table and speaks dialogue to B - then exits. We also had some realistic props such as a standing lamp in the background and some filing cabinets to demonstrate an office-like room.

My group and I also made sure that we didn't break the 180 degree rule. We made this mistake before when performing a practice run and this made it confusing to watch. I concluded that breaking the 180 degree rule would work better for possibly a thriller or horror scene.
My group and I began with one wide screen shoot all the way through.

We then;

• Shot over the shoulder of person A.
• Shot over the shoulder of person B.
• Shot person A all the way through.
• Shot person B all the way through.

We couldn't find anyone willing to take part in our preliminary task at first, so instead two of us from the group got involved by both acting and directing. We filmed each of the following above at least more than three times to create our desired shots. Additionally we found that the lighting needed to be fixed as the image looked too dark.

After this we added a few of our own touches such as a big close-up (BCU) on our actors' faces and close-ups (CU's) on significant props which were used in the scene. For example, we did a close-up on a mobile phone. We also used some point-of-view (POV) shots in one character's perspective.

By taking part in this exercise, we learnt that it is best to plan what we are going to do more efficiently before filming as we wasted a lot of time deciding where to place the camera to get some good shots. This task provided good experiance for us all and helped my knowledge develop during the session.

Here is the video of our prelim task.