Continuity task video

Evaluation of preliminary

I am extremely pleased with our continuity task, the whole look of it being extremely good looking and the whole concept of how it has come together is brilliant.

How many mistakes were made and how will you avoid these in the future?
There are hardly any continuity errors, all of the filming being done in one day so no worry of wrong costume or anything, and we also managed to get all of the criteria into the piece. I would need to watch extremely closely to see if there were any as it looks pretty much like there are none. The shot reverse shot scene, shown below both have the same match being held in the same hand.

The 180 degree pan keeps all of the characters in the same costume and place.

(The first clip of the 180 turn, the side facing from behind Nik is too dark)

I think as we only have two characters it is so easy to watch what they are wearing and doing, on a larger scale of production there wouldn't be as much ease when checking that everyone is in the right place in every shot. Also as the shot is so dark as well, the continuity of smaller details in the clothing and props, did not matter so much as you could hardly see anything anyway.

Parodies or pastiche used?
We wanted to make it look as cliche of a gangster film as possible, while at the same time not making it to similar to other pieces of the same genre. I remember talking with Jack and Nik about using the Hitchcock cliche of the swinging light seen in most of his pieces, or at least the ones i've seen. This seemed a bit to hard to carry out on our piece however and would distract the attention from the two characters, which would be fine if we had longer time to work with. I think we settled upon copying a 30's look of cinema with the dark smokey room, two men talking in over exagerated New York style mafia like talk and one of the characters smoking. I never actually thought that the piece would look as good as it does, with the dull light and smoke.

My job.

My job, as ever, was to film the piece and to edit the majority of the film. The filming process was the best bit this time, usually the editing taking the lead and being something I enjoy the most. We had such a laugh with the matches, flinging them on Nik alight, almost burning Niks lips off, almost burning Niks eyebrows, none of this purposely or with any vendetta. We had to film in the Drama room cupboard as was the only place small enough for how we wanted the piece to be filmed in a small, tight interrogation like room. As there was always a drama class going on and you could hear them 'acting' throughout the video when we came to edit it, we had to re-record the noises and speach for the piece and I had to edit them together/over the original and now muted clips.

Sound added after principal photography;

Foot steps, door creaking and banging shut

Dropping of the folder

Speach of Jack
Speach of Nik

Suprisingly the match was the clearest sound out of the entire piece.

We used a small desk lamp inside a red box, to create a nice hazed light about the room, even though the red light was irrelevant as it was turned into black and white later anyway, a box of matches -only one needed but we wasted quite a few- a table, file and the two actors and we were filmed within a couple of days and edited within a couple of days as well. We all took parts in the editing process and we each took turns in setting up the tripod and camera in the drama cupboard for the next shot, for example I am pretty sure that the shot of Niks face was set up by Jack and I simply stood by it to make sure that it filmed and stood steady all perfectly.

Planning for perliminary continuity task

For our preliminary piece we wanted to create a 30/40's looking piece involving two American/gangster like characters in a small darkly lit room with hardly any light and also hardly any speach. We wanted to show one of the characters tied to a chair and the other to look as if interrogating him.

The piece needed to follow certain criteria:

• 30 seconds long
• shot reverse shot
• use of 180 degree rotation
• match on action

We planned to have a side shot of the two talking with a dull light shining on their faces from the opposite end of the table, opposite the camera. We would be turning it black and white anyway so we didn't need to worry about the colours in the piece, although we needed to make there be a contrast between dark and light textures. It was beginning to look like a film noir piece which makes sense really as most film noir films are shot in black and white with strong contrasts between light and dark and usually they were written around crime or this look of mafia New York.