Practise Film Sequence

This is the practise film sequence that I took part in early in the course. We used this to learn how much you need to plan, how to film with good continuity and to learn to edit. After filming and editing this sequence, we looked to see what we could learn from it.

Planning and storyboarding

Our planning did not go as well as it could have. We ended up spending our time discussing what we should do to make it interesting and so we didn’t have time putting our final idea onto paper and so our story board was incomplete and this made it more difficult to shoot and edit as we had to make some decisions on the spot.

Acting

I felt that the acting was good in general, especially when they were running. However I felt that when we did the close ups, they did not seem to fit into our final piece. I believe this was this was the case as they were looking at the camera when they did this. This could have made the clip less believable.

Selecting shot and angles

Most of our ideas where pretty spontaneous as we didn’t have much material on the storyboard. Our starting shoot was the victim and the killer’s feet running thought this was effective as it leaves a lot of questions for the viewers like; ‘where are they going?’ and ‘why is he chasing him?’ We decided to not show the face of the murderer in any of our shots as it adds some mystery to our story and the character. Also we had had a canted angle to represent distortion and lack of control.

We also had a point of view shot.

Editing decisions

This was a particularly tricky task for us as we could not work the camera at the start so this wasted a lot of our time and so we did  not have enough time to get the all the shots we would have wanted or to experiment with different angles. With this problem, merging the separate clips that we did manage to get appeared to be a bit of a difficulty especially with close ups. I will be sure to spend more time shooting different shots in the actual coursework.

Sound

We didn’t really focus on this as much as the other elements as we thought the original ambient sound worked quite well for the running scenes especially as just having the sound of running leaves the viewers to focus more on that and less on what music we might have used. There was one point in our video that we took out the sound and it just didn’t seem right so we must be sure not to do that in the real one or try to fill it up with a sound effect or background music. We did have some dramatic background music at the murder scene, what I liked about this was that it added tension to that part of the video and when the music picked up in volume so did the atmosphere.

Use of mise-en-scène

I liked having the island as a place where the two actors have the chase, as it has a nice atmosphere there as it had a lot of green leaves and the ground was stony and it had no sign of any buildings and for them to end up in a building makes you think they have run quite far. However I did not like the setting of the murder scene as it was a confined space and it didn’t have a very dramatic atmosphere in my opinion.