Preliminary Task: Evaluation

The preliminary task was our first filming exercise we did this year. It was a new experience and we had a lot of fun, although it was hard work as well. We got to know that making a film is not just pressing the record button; it needs a lot of accurate planning.

It’s difficult to find a start for your planning. If you know what you want to do, what the film is about, then it goes a bit faster. But looking for a good topic is really hard. After finding the topic of our dialog, we chose actors and built all the other things (Mise-en-scene, cinematography, etc.) around it.

During producing our video we made a lot of mistakes. The problem of mistakes during producing a film is that you often just realize that you made a mistake during the very last step of the filmmaking, the editing. If you forgot to take a shot, if someone is wearing the wrong costume, if the light is not good, you see your sequences just before the editing. And filming something a second time costs a lot of time. We had the problem that character 1 is not always wearing his glasses correctly. The plan was that he is wearing them when he enters and leaves the room, but sometimes he just forgot to take them of. The second mistake we made was a trickier one. I am talking about the close up shot on character 1 while he is sighing. The problem was that we put the close up in the editing just on the line above the line of the other shot in the timeline. That means we have ha two audio lines as well, which means we had two sighs at the same time, but they were slightly different. We weren’t just able to delete one of the lines, because then the sound would have been asynchronised. We had to figure a way out that we can have two audio lines; we had to mute one of them during a really short period of time.

For our main task we have learned that every shot needs to have some seconds just before the scene and after it has finished. If you have a long time before something happens, you can cut some frames out. But if you don’t have enough frames, you can’t just add them. In addition to that we will plan our main task more carefully, that we don’t have any of the “sunglass problems”, because we won’t have time to film our sequences again.

(Simon)