How Successful Was Your Sequence? Please Identify What Worked Well and With Hindsight, What Would You Improve/Do Differently?
Brief:-Continuity task involving 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.
I feel we completed the task successfully as we kept to the brief and did everything that it stated we should of done. Our sequence contained a girl walking into a room and opening the door to do so, which contained a match on action, two gossiping girls exchanging dialogue seen in a shot reverse shot, and we stuck to the 180-degree rule as we kept on the same side of the characters throughout.
When watching our sequence back it does all seem to flow fairly well and fits together almost seamlessly. All the matches on action work really well and the shot reverse shots and reaction shots seem realistic and plausible. When watching it you cannot notice the edits and it just looks like one continuous piece of footage which is what we had hoped to achieve. The shot types were all what we had intended them to be and we pretty much followed our storyboard as much as possible showing our idea worked just as well on paper as it did in reality.
The sound was also really clear and you can understand exactly what the characters are saying throughout. It does no in corporate too much of the background noise but allows the audience to hear enough for them to understand what is going on around the characters, for example the keyboard typing and the door opening and closing.
The establishing shot at the beginning show where the characters are in relation to each other so that further on in the sequence we do not get confused. However the establishing shot at the beginning was supposed to be after the shot of actress two walking through the door and it was supposed to be a slow pan from actress one typing to actress two walking through the door so we could see the distance between the 2 characters and the location but because the shot before this one showed actress two already having come through the door it did not make sense when it was put in the sequence. Therefore we thought it was more plausible to have just a still shot of actress one typing at the beginning to show where about in the room she is in relation to the door and then continue with our original sequence. It was not our intended establishing shot but we still felt it worked well and made sense to the audience.
I feel that in the shot where actress one says 'What's up?' and then it cuts to a shot of actress two standing by the door about to pull up a chair there is too long a pause between the end of the action in one shot to the start of the action in the second one. It seems unnatural and unrealistic. It creates suspense in the sequence because it takes longer for us to find out what is going to be said but at the same time i think it holds it for just a bit too long and it makes it seem as if they are waiting for the director to shout cut or action. It does not have the pace that the rest of the sequence has making it stand out and not seem to flow as nicely.
The reaction shot towards the end of the sequence where actress three walks through the door and actress's one and two react to her coming in was a lot shorter than the original shot we had intended to use and the sound was moved to this one from another shot to make it make sense and fit with the rest of the sequence. This was because in the original shot the actress's take far too long to react to the sound of the door and therefore it looked staged and set up. It did not seem as if they had been interrupted mid conversation but instead had been sitting in silence for a long period of time which is not the effect we had hoped to achieve. However when we cut the shot down to make their reactions a lot faster and not have so long before the action begins, we lost a huge chunk of sound which involved the sound of the door opening. Without the sound of the door the reaction shot would have not made sense as they would not have been reacting too anything and the audience would not have been able to understand it. So in order for us to make this shot make sense we had to work with the sound and the clip as two separate things and cut them to the appropriate lengths separately. We then had to group them together again in a way that did not look like the sound had come from a different part of the original shot. The outcome looks plausible but it took a lot more effort and work to make this shot work than we had originally thought or planned for but if we had not done it, the continuity of our sequence would of been effected.
In the shot that showed actress two saying her dialogue to actress one we had to shoot the shot many times due to actress two moving around to much and therefore her head being cut off in the camera and the framing of the shot being affected. We did 12 takes of this but there was only 1 take that had her sitting still enough for her to still be in the camera when she was talking. This meant that we had to use this shot and we did not have a choice although it was not the most perfect shot for the continuity or the dialogue that was said. Some of the other takes of this shot would of worked better with the continuity of the sequence but we could not use them as they contained too much movement. If we were to redo this task i would have shot that shot more times until we had a range of takes where she did not move and therefore we would of had a variety of shots to choose from. However due to the amount of time we had to shoot or sequence we did not have enough time to do this so we ended up just getting one take that we were able to use.
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