The Preliminary Task

After completing our practise task we then began our preliminary exercise. It will involve filming a character opening a door crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, they then exchange a few lines of dialogue we have to demonstrate match on action, shot reverse shot and 180-degree rule. We have been advised to film within the school so that we can complete the task quickly as we only have a week to finish the exercise.

Tuesday 24th Jan
Though the task seems fairly simple it was difficult to come up with an idea that could be done within the school but was also exciting to watch. After brainstorming a few ideas we decided to walk around the 6th form building to find some locations that would be good to use.
We developed 3 ideas:
1. A character would be stuck in the lift shouting and banging on the doors our second character would find and save him/her then both characters would sit down and talk about what happened.
2. One character would join the other character in the cafe and then continue to have a conversation.
3. It would be set in the 6th form office as one character leaves the other character steals information from his/her computer before the character then returns, sits down and they then exchange a few lines and the 'theif' leaves quickly.

We discovered that we couldn't use the lift because of health and safety reasons and there are too many people that are in the cafe all day so we decided to make the office scene. We talked to the heads of the 6th form too see whether it was ok to use the office they said it was ok aslong as we were supervised. This was good news we could then get on with our plan and hope to do the filming quickly after. We spent the rest of the lesson planning, deciding who would act, which props we would use and we completed our storyboard, this meant we could then film in the following lesson.

Thursday 26th Jan
During our lesson in the afternoon and a bit of time after school we completed the filming with a few 'small' disagreements between us.

Friday 27th Jan
Today was a DISASTER we went to lesson expecting to get on with our editing but our SD card with all our filming on was lost. A week of work was wasted!
We will have to refilm everything our teacher Mr Croft says that this is a good thing as it will stop us from making the mistake of not uploading it to the computer straight away the future when we've got all our film on it.

Monday 30th Jan
After a stressfull weekend I was expecting to do lot of work to catch up with to the other groups but hero Mr Croft found the SD card with all our filming on *sigh of relief* we were able to start the editing process with only a few lessons left to complete it. Joe went in at lunch to upload the films on to the editing programme and then placed the shots in order. In my study period I continued to edit the footage cutting off unwanted seconds and fitting the shots together.

Today I carried on with the editing. On whole the film looks ok but there is more precise editing that is needed an we need to decide on a soundtrack, this will have to be done next lesson (thursday) as we all have different study periods and are too busy at lunch times.

Thursday 2nd Feb
We had 30 mins in todays lesson to finish editing, as the clock ticked we were getting worried and didn,t think we would meet our deadline but we persevered and quickly chose a soundtrack and fit it to the clip, we then made the transitions between shots a bit smoother and added oour names and title to the video and VOILA! We just finshed as the time was up *another sigh of relief*.