Practise Film Sequence

This is my practise film sequence, which I carried out in a different group. We were given the task of filming a short sequence leading to a murder as practise for the filming task in the coursework.

Evaluation of murder scene

Planning and storyboarding:

We began our storyboard by creating a beginning and an end for the murder scene, this allowed us to fill in the blanks and it gave us a rough idea on how we were going to film it. Unfortunately we weren’t able to film some of our more ambitious scenes, this was due to difficulty and lack of time. This meant that we had to change some of the scenes around to make it fit together, and this lowered the overall impact of the story. We also decided to change how we filmed some scene because in practice some of our ideas weren’t as effective as we first thought

Acting:

All of the actors in are murder sequence were fairly capable in want we wanted to achieve, although Raphael did tend to struggle at times when trying to follow direction, such as smiling at the camera when trying to be serious. I would try to avoid this when filming my actual coursework because this didn’t portray the character in the way we were aiming for.

Selecting shots and angles:

The first scene starts off with an establishing shot of a stairwell and lockers, which slowly pans and then stops on the main character. We choose this because it helps to introduce the scene effectively whilst introducing the main character; unfortunately we suffered from poor lighting under the stairs this meant that we weren’t able to achieve the right effect of introducing the character. Another issue we had with this scene was timing with the panning, this lead to a lot of wasted time with one scene which we could have used on more difficult scenes.

We tried to implement as many different angles in are scenes, so that each scene would be interesting to watch, one angle we tried was a POV shot from inside the locker looking at the actor taking items out of the locker, we choose this because it fully introduces the main character and doubles as a close-up shot which allows the viewer to see the characters emotions.

In one scene we tried to attempt a 360 degree panning shot, which ended up being the most difficult shot we did. In the end it became a 180 degree shot because it was too difficult getting the whole 360 degrees due to spatial reasons. This wasn’t a scene we were that happy with because it was very shaky because we weren’t equipped and prepared for such a difficult shot. I probably would not use this shot in my actual coursework because it’s too tricky to do and the end results were poor.

In our murder scene we decided to film the death through a bush, this gave us another POV shot and made it seem as if there was a witness to the murder. This shot was chosen because the having the leaves in corners of the frame just gives some colour contrast on the mostly brown background, it was also chosen because it gives the scene more visual impact.

Camera & tripod:

We didn’t struggle using the camera for filming, our biggest problem was some of our more tricky shots which had us fiddling with the camera to take it off the tripod or balance it on something to keep it steady. The tripod was simply to use although we did have issues trying to get everything level but they were soon resolved.

Use of mise-en-scène:

The main idea we had when it came to location was, it’s set in a school, and we tried to show that in our establishing shot with the lockers, but our location for the murder scene was tricky because we were looking for a dark ruined alleyway kind of look, which we found behind one of the buildings which suited what we were looking for quite well. Because we were portraying students at a school costumes weren’t an issue, but we used a few hoodies to make certain characters stand out from one another.

Our biggest issue was props, because we didn’t have any, this meant we had to improvise using a ruler in a bag as one of the murder weapons. In the actually murder itself we never show a weapon being used, but this creates more mystery with the murder.

The use of lighting was very poor because it wasn’t a factor we were prepared for. This led to some scene being too dark, this is apparent in our first introducing scene when the main character’s face is too dark.

Editing:

In the opening shot the camera fades in from black to panning, this gives a nice sense of flow to the scene and keeps it smooth. Some of our editing could have been smoother such as the flashback scene which looks like a random piece of footage was left in. This feels very jarring and could have perhaps been edited more smoothly with a fade.

A lot of the shots didn’t flow well together, such as the running sequence. In these shots we tried to make it appear seamless, but every time it cut it looks like he is going from stationary to running instead of smooth running.