FIlm Evaluation Task

For this Prelim Task I was asked to film a character opening a door, crossing the room, sitting down opposite another character and exchanging a few lines of dialogue.
The plot for my film is: a police detective who pokes his nose too far into a crooks business, and feels the consequences of his actions.
To begin with I made a story board, but after trying to shoot the first few shots and having difficultly fulfilling the angles and camera movements I had set myself, I changed my mind on the whole production and decided to draw up a new one. This one would be in the police station rather than where the crook was holding the detective hostage. Fortunately I could use some of the original shots, but unfortunately most of them I had to re-draw. I reused some of the shots off of the first story board, cutting them up, but I didn’t think to photocopy it first, so all I have is my final story board.
In the end, some of the descriptions of what should happen in each shot have changed, like the camera angles and movement, even whole shots. In the original script the police detective is tied up in a room, and the crook comes in and talks to him. But the second story board shows the crook in the police station as he’s been called there. But I have mixed the two first shots on the boards together; my film starts in the future (a day later) with the detective tied to a chair, but then peels (an effect I used) to the present day with the crook walking into the room. I originally wanted the shot of the character tied up with the camera starting at the characters feet, and it to spiral upwards to his face. But this proved too difficult as we didn’t have the appropriate equipment for such a shot, so I changed it in the second board to a simple eye-level zoom out shot of the actors face. But when it came to the actual filming, I felt it would be better to zoom in on the characters face, rather than out.
After the opening two shots I was going to put a calendar into the film to show the day change fading slowly from the 7th to the 6th, but when I filmed it, I couldn’t figure out how to put a calendar, or something in that area that represented time had moved on, so I simply used a ‘peel’ effect, as I said above, but now I come to think of it I should have used a dissolve or fade effect.
The crook in the film is scarier than I portrayed her to be on the story board, but that’s how I asked her to play it, as it would fit in more with the Coppers kidnapping earlier in the film- well later if you go in logical time.
I’ve also added a shot which isn’t shown on the board, it’s a shot of the crook striding out of the room; it’s in between shot number 17 and 18. Furthermore on shot 18 the description of the edit says fade, but I’ve used a traditional cut instead, because a fade doesn’t keep up with the fast pace of the edits I have produced. Plus in shot 16 I have a used a high angle shot to show the two character arguing with each other, as the classroom I filmed this in wasn’t big enough to let me get both characters in, and I also didn’t use a MCU because the camera couldn’t zoom in that close and still get both characters faces in, so it was a mistake on my behalf.
Shot six, isn’t in my final piece, to the reason of we didn’t have the right equipment to produce a dark foreground and a light background resulting in a silhouette of the villain standing in the doorway. I wanted the shoot to be exactly like this, so the viewers didn’t see who the person was that had kidnapped the detective; so as it couldn’t be produced I left it out. There wasn’t a great need for the shot any way, if we would have been able to put music into the production diegetic tic or non-diegetic, then with atmospheric music and the silhouette of the person it would have created suspense, but as that wasn’t required of me to do the shot is easily left out.
I am happy with how the prelim task panned out. But if I was to do this again I would not be so ambitious with my shots and angles’, considering this is only a college, and doesn’t have all the facilities Hollywood does! So keep it simple!!