Preliminary Exercise

Hello,
Sorry it has been a while i have been bombarded with work. So this is the first post in a while. I have been, keeping a "log" however, this is in word so i shall type out what it says but more in depth.

Story Board

First of all my group and I, drew up a basic story board. This consisted of two people texting, then walking around the school, eventually meeting. Once they meet, they sit under some stair and swap some dialogue. This storyboard was very basic; it didn't include any media terminology. However when it comes to our actual assignment we shall develop the storyboard, allot more than this one has been. 

On Thursday the 16th of the September, my group and myself started to record our preliminary exercise. We followed the story board rather accurately. Although, we made slight alterations, here and there. This was as we didn't go into enough detail, in the original storyboard; so we shall make sure that we improve upon this for the future. Once we started filming, we all seemed to sync as a team and were instantly filming great, near one take shots. We had a few miss hap’s; this was mainly due to lighting (the sun caused some of the shots to have too much back lighting, causing the actor/actress to become blacked out). With the scene “receiving the text message" there was technical difficulty, with the mobile phones interference and the microphone, (causing a most irritating noise) we overcame this by turning off the microphone. This could have also been done by muting the audio in the clip when editing it.

script and 180 degree original

In the scene under the stairs we finally had some duologue; we sat as a group, and came up with a basic script involving the two characters discussing an issue then swapping a prop over (drinks bottle). We also sketched out a quick plan of our 180 degree rule although this original one, annotated "script and 180 degree original", with the script didn't work; dew to the sunlight again. We then drew up another one as shown below, this new one shows the two characters placement, the circles with names labelled next to them. There is also a dotted line, with one side shaded to show where the camera will not encroach. (This is so that the audience is not confused about the positioning of the actors). There are also some crude drawings to represent the camera angles. In this scene there are three angles that are used:

180 degree rule

• Over Ryan's shoulder, aimed at Fran. (This is mainly used for shots of Fran speaking)
• Over Fran's shoulder, aimed at Ryan. (This is mainly used for shots of Ryan speaking)
• Middle shot, showing both Fran and Ryan both at the same time; (this is used for fewer scenes. However, it helps to add to the viewer's comfort)

We then had a Major technical malfunction with the audio in our scenes. The microphone that we had been using had not picked up on any audio. This then required us to go back to rerecorded all the scenes. We realized that this wouldn't work as we didn't have enough time to record all scenes, thus we only recorded scenes with audio or duologue in it. When we tried to rerecord the talk scene the actors got a bad case of the giggles, causing us to spend allot of time getting shots of them laughing. (Making great blooper footage). We then finally got all the shot that we needed to get for the preliminary; after offloading them we organized them ready to be used in our editing.