Prelim Task 1

In our group, we were given a camera and a storyboard and told to film a short scene. The scene is about a person (A) that wants the other person (B) to do something as they are in trouble, B refuses to do it, and A leaves. The first thing we did was go to the studio which is where we were told to film and decided where about in the room we would film. After we decided we would film in a pre-setup set of a living room, we set up the tripod, we extended the legs until the camera was about five feet tall so it could be close to the hight of the actors but not too tall, then we put the camera on the tripod and inserted the battery and made sure the spirit level was steady, then we were ready to film. We focused the camera by zooming as far as possible and then getting the lens to as crisp an image as possible on the actors so in some shots for example we could have the actors walk to their markers where we focused them and then we could have them walk into focus. We filmed for a an hour and tried different shots such as a high angle, close up, long shot, over the shoulder shot, etc. doing as many shots as possible was good to help make the editing easier.


The "standby", "rolling", "action" and "cut" rules were utilised a lot while on set. The rule is that when the director shouts "standby" is that the set has to go silent and the actors position themselves so that the scene is ready to start filming straight away. After "standby" is said, "rolling" is said to get the camera man to start recording, they say this and not action straight away so that no dialogue is cut from the scene due to the camera operator pressing record too late or the actors saying their lines too early, this allows all the dialogue to be heard and caught on camera. When "action is said, this tells the actors to start acting, this means that if the camera operator starts recording late, the actors won't already be acting, so they have a buffer zone for any mistakes and gives final moments for preparation. After "action", cut is said to end the scene. If "cut" is used, this means that either the scene is over or it is being ended prematurely due to a mistake in the scene, so "cut" signifies the end of the scene.

A problem we had as a group was focusing, this is because we did not use markers to start with, we realised that when character A walked into the scene, she would walk in different lengths into the room to start with as she had no guide lines on where to stand. To solve the problem of focusing we ran the scene without filming, and put markers on the floor where she would have to walk to in the scene, this allowed her to walk into focus accurately so that the footage didn't seem out of focus. Another thing that helped get a clean focus is that when parts of the frame are lit up and in focus, the bright areas are covered by green lines, however, if it is lit up but not in focus, the green lines won't appear

If I was able to do the shoot again, I would rather have spent less time on the shots that we had to do for the story board and spent more time on using other shots such as the high angle shot that I wanted to do for character B as she is represented as a weak character throughout the entire scene so I would have also like to represent her as a weak character through camera work and not just dialogue. On the whole however, I think the shoot went well as the camera work went well, we used the right settings on the camera so the brightness didn't have to be changed in post-production and we didn't have to do any colour grading either as the white balance was good.

None of the actors had the chance to learn the script before filming, this ended up meaning that we had to have the scripts on set all the time, so we had to tape them onto walls that couldn't be seen by the camera but the actors could see them, this grew into a problem as sometimes in the footage, it was noticeable that the actors weren't looking at each other as they were looking at the script, so for the thriller, I will give the actors the script to learn before the shooting schedule so that they can know their lines before they come on set and their won't be need for a script.