Preliminalary Task Diary

Our finished Preliminary Task

3/10/12
For out Preliminary task, we had to film a scene that involved someone walking towards a door, opening it, and walking through to have a short conversation with somebody.

We were struggling to put together a script for the conversation, so we came up with Nadib exiting the room where Matt's Friends are, the storyline is that Matt and Nadib don't get on, so when Matt meets Nadib outside the room when heading to meet his  Friends, he can enter the room and confront his Friends about why they have been hanging around with Nadib.

Once we had this planned, we began to think about which camera shots we were going to use, we chose to use over shoulder shots when filming Matt and Nadib squaring up to each other, an extreme close up/match on action of the door handle when Matt puts his hand on it.

All in all the filming was easy to get through, we found a good location in the School building, which gave us good options for camera shots by standing on tables to get good high angle shots of Matt walking through the door.

We still have one last section to film, which is Matt walking through the door and having the conversation with Mo and Aran, this potentially could be the more difficult part as we don't know how well Mo and Aran are on camera, and it needs more planning i.e camera shots, and further conversation.

4/10/12

We stayed behind after school last night and filmed part of the conversation between Matt, Mo and Aran, we were forced to stay behind after school because we used another member of staff's classroom to film our scene, and this classroom isn't always free. This part of our filming included a low angle shot of Matt, a Medium shot of Mo, and a two shot of Mo and Aran when they're talking to Matt.

We are also planning to use an unspecified event, Aran Say's to Matt "I don't know why you've got a problem with him" Matt replies "you know what he did", so the audience establish something has gone on between the two, they just don't know, or ever find out what it was.

As we have only filmed part of the conversation a new struggle has come up, as we need to finish our task by Tuesday next week, Mo is absent for a lesson, and the classroom we have been using is occupied, we don't know whether Mo is off sick or just not attending the lesson, so we have the option of waiting to see if Mo is in and working after school again, or re-filming the entire conversation scene again, but without Mo.

9/10/12

We have managed to finish our preliminary task, but cut it fine as we finished yesterday, and it's due in today. We met yesterday lunchtime in the classroom that we have been using for filming, which luckily was free, and we finished filming the final part of the conversation between Matt, Mo, and Aran.

This scene was quite difficult to film, because we had some good idea's for a variety of camera shots, but were not keen on using the shot which goes behind the back of a character showing that it has crossed the 180 degree line, so we decided not to use them, but overall, we are quite pleased with the way that the scene turned out.

Another issue that we had with filming this scene which is kind of why we finished it last minute, is with all 4 of us have completely different timetables, we struggled to find a slot where we were all free, and then when we did find a slot, we were all a bit unreliable in turning up to the time slot we had arranged, so we then had to re-arrange a new time to meet and continue filming.

The third issue in filming this final part of the task is there were a few parts that we had to shoot again, because we got midway through filming the conversation, then when we went to start re-filming, we realised that Mo and Aran were wearing different clothes to the previous lesson, whereas Matt had brought his with him to change into when filming continued, so we had to re-shoot the beginning of the conversation.

All in all, I think the filming has been a success, it's our first filming task in our Media Studies, and we were working with people who we haven't worked with before, so at the beginning we could almost guarantee it wouldn't all go to plan and run smoothly.