First Continuity Exercise

Hello! well this week we have been filming our first continuity exercise. This is basically where we ensure that factors occurring in our scenes do not cause confusion to the viewer, eg. moving more than 30 degrees after each shot to prevent creating the illusion of "de ja vu". If this does happen, it is called a "jump shot" (just a bit of Media terminology for you guys)

Firstly, we planned our exercise using play dough. We created little characters (as cute as they were) with pictures of our faces on it, pretending that they were us. I know it seems pointless, but we did it so we could establish which shot types we were going to use. After we attempted to film a short film with play dough, we went on to film our real film. This proved much harder than we thought it would be. We opened up this exercise with an establishing shot with the camera facing the actor. This was tricky to film as when we imported it on to the computer you could see the director (Catherine) holding the door open for the actor to walk through. We then moved on to film the actor with the camera behind the actor, this took many attempts but eventually we managed to get it just right! Yes, we will eventually upload the out-takes of that scene. Afterwards we filmed a close up of the door being opened, this was hard to edit in as we had to many shots of it so therefore it kept jumping, which didnt look very good on camera. 

We then moved on to the next scene; the most difficult scene! As the character walked through the door it jumped a huge amount to a different angle so it looks like the actor opened the door and jumped to the position what she was standing in. The disadvantage of doing the next shot was that as character 2 walked through the automatic doors, the 2 actors kept laughing at each other so it was very hard to carry on with the filming, so after numerous shots we decided to give up and move on to the next shot. This looked odd as this also jumped, character 2 didnt walk close enough to character 1 to start a conversation, so you can see where we have cut the camera to begin the next shot. Another disadvantage is the close up shot of the camera. When character 2 asks for the time, character 1 forgets to tell character 2 the time and then immediately, without focusing on the time, she automatically says that she is late and runs off, leaving character 2 feeling awkward as she runs out the door and up the stairs to where she has just come from.

If we was to re film this scene, we would change location to a straight corridor instead of a small corridor in which the character have to rotate to begin the next scene. The reason for this is because it was very hard to stick to the script and it was very hard to film the 30 degree rule as there wasn't much space. Also we had many interruptions because were filming in one of the main entrances in the college so we had numerous amounts of people walking through our shots, so therefore it took longer to film and most of all we got too distracted and couldn't concentrate on what we was doing during the main scene.

That's all for now. Don't worry, you'll hear from us again soon