Evaluation Activity 7: Editing and camera work

I feel that I have learnt a lot since the preliminary task and it shows in the final production.

The preliminary task allowed us to explore different camera shots and techniques I had never used before. We were taught how to create a perfect match on action edit to show the movement of a person, for example, we used a match on action of someone walking through a door. 

We used a lot of this kind of edit in our thriller opening to emphasise the fast pace and to get across the amount of panic the holly was feeling when she realised there was an intruder. I think this was very effective because made our film very fast moving and created tension for viewers.

We also learnt about the 180 degree rule whilst doing the preliminary task; we practised this rule by filming a conversation between two people, the camera always staying within the 180 degrees. The camera was always kept on the right hand side of the actors, within the 180 degrees. This is important because if the rule is broken it can be very disorientating for the viewer and won’t make sense in their heads.

My Preliminary task group realised that we had lots out takes and very few clips to put our production together with. When it came to editing my thriller opening I learnt from this mistake by filming shots lots of times each to make sure that we had at least one that was good enough.

As we filmed over a couple of days, we were wearing different clothes. This caused continuity errors and meant that we had to redo all the filming we had done on the first day and finish it all on the second day. To prevent this when we were filming ‘Ready or Not’, we filmed everything we needed to in one day. This meant that everyone was wearing the same clothes and there were no continuity errors in our final production.

Since the preliminary task, we have also learnt the situations in which certain shots are used. Unlike in the preliminary task when we were just using random camera angles, we can explain why we used different types of shots in our production. For example, we used a shot from inside the shed to show there was a presence and made sure it was shaky so it looked like it was actually a point of view shot from another person. I think our understanding of camera angles and shots has grown a lot since we started learning about filming and editing.