Planning - Miss Begum: Preliminary Task

Preliminary Task

The Purpose of the Preliminary task was to find out how good with a camera and organising equipment for filming. In our preliminary task we decided to capture an spontaneous conversation between friends. We had a limit amount of time however we decided on what was our scenario and the how we could film it.

Final Video

The scenario

Our scenario happens when two friends are talking about what recently happened in the news, This was planned as an spontaneous event. Baris and shakil as the main actors. and i was filming and doing the editing. All of us had say what should happen and how we would film and edit it.

The scene starts of baris being called over by shkiall. the purpose of doing this was to show the conversation was spontaneous.

After that the film transitions into seeing them talking with each other about what was happening in Paris.

The scene ends when baris gets up and leave the room, However the film had many problems that we that we didn't anticipated. However we have come up ways of stopping this from happening during the main film.

Has any of our roles changed?

Originally the location manager was shakil however his locations he choose was too loud since they was lessons going as well i intervened and suggested the common room since that was a more quieter place and was more easier to film then in the break out spaces. Because of this all of used talked about who should be location manger however we all decided that i should look for the locations. We also decided to have actors in our final opening scene since Me, baris or shikail cant act also it also it looks unprofessional if we acting in our own films as well as editing, filming and recording.

Problems we had filming

The main problem I had was keeping the camera steady. Since were not provided with an tripod some of the shots were unstable and at some points I had to ask to restart filming again just so that the camera wasn't shaking. Its really hard to keep the camera still because your so focus trying to get an accurate shot its really hard to keep the camera steady. I did use objects where ever possible to keep the camera still however the downside of doing that you might not get an accurate or good shot. Another problem we had was that they wasn't much space to film the preliminary task
 We chose an place which there was not much space to film. Therefore while I was filming I had my back against a window next to a blind and therefore to avoid hearing me banging against a window. We had no choice but to break the 180 degrees rule.


As shown here.





This meant for a part of the preliminary task it looked like we had the camera angle in a weird angle however it wasn't off putting.

Another problem we had during the filming was that i shot an angle wrong. The original idea was it to shot reverse shot however because i didn't have any much room to kneel to take the shot i had to stand up and this was a bad mistake since the angle i decided to film at was at an high angle then i was originally planned. We have thought off ways to stop these mistakes in our final opening scenes. This includes watching playback via my laptop since my laptop has an SD Card reader which allows us to watch the playback of we recorded on our camera.

Difficulties we had Editing

Editing was also another major problem we had since we havnt used apple imovie before. We didnt know how to cut films properly or to split films. We had to learn how to use imoive very quickly however when we started to use imovie the fire alarm went off so I had to work on the film during most of the lunchtime so therefore I had limited time to edit the film however I managed to pull it off we had many clips of us recording the preliminary recordings this meant I was able to slice off clips together, However this was the only mistake i made during editing.

As you can see from this picture the transition happen too early. this was a mistake i made because the first clip before the transition should of last slightly longer however this wasn't an important part could be better.

What have we learned.

we had many issues on how to film and what we should do to resolve these issues. The preliminary task was designed to show us how we would cope since we didn't know how to use the camera or the editor however we learnt what we should do during filming. We also found ways on how we can improve filming and editing and what we shouldn't do while recording. Another point that we learned is that too make any film without mistakes takes time. The preliminary task was rushed however if we had more time we would of spotted and we would of corrected or mitigate these mistakes. However for the final we need to make sure that we spot these mistakes and correct them as quickly as possible.

Conclusion 

Has the task been beneficial for the group?

This task was important and beneficial for me and our group the preliminary task highlighted the mistake i and the group made. We have thought of ways to stop this from happening or ways that we can improve filming and what we can do if these mistakes do happen and what we should mitage these problems. We also understand the difficulty the opening scene maybe this was also great opportunity to test the equipment and software that we are using so that we know how to use it.