Preliminary exercise evaluation

Preliminary exercise evaluation

Brief

The preliminary exercise involves filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. 

This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule. 

Planning process and pre-production

In terms of planning, what this preliminary exercise was able to showcase was the fact that communication across the groups we work in as part of the MEST2 coursework, will be crucial in helping us obtain the top grades. Since we didn't actually carry this out effectively, it meant that elements of our production weren't as detailed as others with this particularly holding true for the shot list, storyboard and script.

Although in coming together as a whole they worked quite well, it could've potentially been better if we had all members of the group working on the pre-production pieces as a collective and feed off of each others ideas while doing it, as oppose to just doing it independently without reference to anything else e.g. group member working on script not having a storyboard to base it upon.

Additionally, being organised in terms of time (when we're going to film) is imperative since dedicating more time than you think you may need to actually making the film can mean that you have more shots to actually work  with in editing as oppose to less which we to some extent, encountered with our production since we in some parts rushed scenes as is evident at 00:34 of the video.

Strengths

One of the clear strengths of our video was our ability of 'capture' the atmosphere that one may come to expect in the scenario of an interrogation. From a sound standpoint, this was done by the more serious parallel, non-diegetic sound in the very beginning of the video, the exclamations of Mamduh, the emotional cries of Abdi but also the silence when the scene cuts to the shot of myself behind the glass window. This leads into the idea of conventions in that one would not be able to hear the dialogue of an interrogation if they weren't in the room, they'd only be able to witness it as it played out. 

This is further added to with lighting, in which a low-key type was implemented with the lamp being the sole source of light visible in the scene. The way in which it highlights only the objects placed on the table by the interrogator and the faces of the characters around the desk not only works towards this idea of iconography for the thriller genre, but it additionally puts a substantial amount of focus on that area in the room instead of there being other distracting elements present.

Our attention to detail is also something that can be commended since by having the CCTV recording template only show up in the scenes where the high-angle shot of the whole room is used, there's an even deeper sense that an actual interrogation is taking place.

More fundamentally though, we abided by the key principles we were asked to follow with match on action with things like Mamduh kicking the chair, shot-reverse shot between Abdi and Mamduh and also maintaining the 180 degree rule.

Weaknesses

Although our lighting could have been said to play to our favour in helping establish the atmosphere of an interrogation, it can also be said to have been one of our disadvantages. With it being dark throughout the entire scene, with the light from the lamp being the only source of light, there were some problems with the visual aspects of our production with grain being present and just not being able to fully identify with the characters and get sutured into the narrative since they were too dark to see.

Another disadvantage relates to the CCTV recording template since the time in the top-right corner was actually constant and never changed. This is important from an attention to detail standpoint since with a real CCTV camera, the time would be changing with each second going by and would not just stay constant for the entirety of its recording.

As already stated in the 'Planning process and pre-production' section, we did have a bad cut within the scene that didn't work well at all and broke the idea of continuity editing. In future to avoid this, what we're going to do is ensure that we record for the entirety of a scene and not stop recording while dialogue is still ongoing unless it plays a part in the plot of our production. As well as this in terms of editing, we have to ensure that cuts between scenes only happen at the end of our clips and not any point before that, or else we essentially completely void the concept of continuity editing within our productions.