Continuity Editing Exercise

The scenario was called The Encounter in which we were asked to work work in  a group of 2/3 and film a short dialogue between 2 people which had to last between 45 seconds to a minute long.
180 Degree Rule
The 180 degree rule is used to not confuse the audience. To do this, thew camera must stay on a certain side so that the actors are always on the the same sides. This small feature makes a big difference to production. this helps with the audiences orientation to ensure that they understand the actions. Here is a little example:

Shown above is an example on how the rule of thirds work. As you can see as the camera goes over the imaginary line, it becomes wrong so it must always stay on the right side.

Rule Of Thirds

Here is an example

Shot Reverse Shot

Shot Reverse shot is a film technique where one character is shown looking at another character and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character. As the characters are shown in opposite directions they are made to seem like they are looking at each other

Here is an example:

We were trying to demonstrate the rule of thirds, the 180 degree rule and a shot reverse shot. These all had to be included into our short production and i feel as though we did this quite well as we stuck to the rules to the best of our ability and added a short reverse shot where possible.
To plan and film my work, I worked with Kieran Jeewock and Niraj Jadav. I feel as though we worked quite well in a group and this helped as we could get work done to the best of our ability and know what we were doing.

Niraj and Kieran were the actors in the film and I was the main camera man as i was very creative and knew what shots were good with different scenes. The grouping was a success as we all had knowledge in media so we could put it together to have produced a good short film. Also we didn't fall back on time, we kept up and got the work in advance which gave us the chance to help others from different groups.

Our scenario came from a true story and was a sixth form student was to walk into a food shop and would try get a discount for the food and this led to a confrontation between the waiter and the student. we tried to create suspense but at the same time add humor to not make it such a serious film. We thought of this as we were thinking of different ideas for our film.

The reason the rule of thirds and the 180 degree rule were effective, is because these rules make the production look more professional and it also helped my knowledge on these rules as i had never really used it much but now i feel more confident to use it. Also it is used to not confuse the audience with the actors being on different sides so the 180 degree rule is really effective and can make a change to the production. The match on action and shot reverse shot were really effective as these were two new shots to me which i had never used. These shots were used to show emotion and reactions and i think that was needed in our work the most as it involved a lot of facial expressions and emotions so worked well with our piece of work. We had different ideas but we thought this idea would be easy to produce and to add all the key shots. We thought it would add a bit of realism as it was based on a true event so we went for this idea and found ways to keep it funny but tense and i feel as though it worked.

Our storyboard was very useful as it gave us a clear indication of what shot we had to do and the camera angle. This made it less time consuming as we knew exactly what we had to do and how we would shoot it.

We stuck to most of our shots as we feel they looked really effective in  the camera angle they were used in but a couple of our shots we changed the establishing shot as it wasn't very clear of the location so we changed it to a long shot of the outside of the canteen so it established the location and was clear and easy to understand. The reason for us sticking to our storyboard was mainly because it had all been set out for us so was very straight forward and nothing had to be changed. If we had to change more shots, i think we would have taken a lot longer and would've had to cramp in more shots with little time. This would have made it less professional as we would've been rushing the majority of the shots so it think it was a better idea that we stuck with the majority of our original shots.
Here below, is my storyboard: