Analysis of my preliminary task

As part of research and planning me and my partner, James, scouted different areas of the school to film in but returned to our class room deciding that it was the quietest and undisturbed set. It also held some great props and the space we needed for the task. We then storyboarded and scripted our short film including camera angles and shots.

The film started with a short slug with the the title appearing in a typewriter style across the screen which then crossfades into the first scene. The first scene is of an empty hall way with a door in view. I then walk across the shot to the door. This scene was steady and shows a medium long shot of a walk in to a space action. The next shot is of James's face at eye level covering the right half of the screen with me looking through the glass from the other side of the door. This shot was well thought out and creates a tense mood, to improve this scene I felt that we should have used the focus distance to first focus on james's face then have that blur as, in the background, I come in to focus. This was a technical problem as me and James didn't know how to use Final cut to edit this in. The third shot was a close up of my hand opening the door handle quickly followed by a match on action scene of me opening the door from the other side of it and walking past James.

The next scenes could have been improved as the dialogue was dubbed in after editing. This did not work very well at all as we had to use over the shoulder shots during the conversation but over the shoulder of the person speaking to hide the unsynchronised lip movement and voice over. I felt that given more time I could have dubbed this in much better therefore bypassing the problem of relying on the weak microphone on the camera. The next shot was planned as a birds eye view shot but ended up being an extremely high angle shot instead because of spacial limitations. Even so, this shot worked very well indeed as it shows the power balance between the 2 characters as one leans forward and the other leans away from him. The last scene was a POV shot from James's side showing my character opening a large case, looking inside, and closing it again without the audience ever seeing what is inside. This then ends on a cliffhanger as it fades to black as my character looks up, mortified.

I feel very satisfied with this although given more time to work with I think it could have been greatly improved.