7) Look back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

We used the preliminary task as a chance to explore what shot types and camera movements we could use. Baring in mind we needed to shoot a match on action, shot-reverse-shot and use the 180 degree rule, we played around with different scenarios and events to put in the film. The first shot form our continuity exercise was of Billy Garratt-John walking down a corridor and into a classroom. We saw that the long shot from behind not only looked good on camera, but was a great way to introduce that characters at the start of the film as you give a visual idea of the character but you don’t give everything away at once. This builds minor anticipation to find out more. We then used this type of long shot in our opening to introduce both of our protagonists. 

When editing, we came across the difficulties of putting different videos together and cutting the at the rights points to make the continuity of the film flow. After a long day of cutting and rearranging, we finally came to a point where the film was fluent. We also experienced problems with the audio from one half of the conversation cutting over into the other half. We fiddled with the sound an video settings and managed to use this problem and turn it into a soundbridge. When we shot Billy walking in to the room from outside in the corridor and when we shot him from inside the room, he is walking at different speeds. When we noticed this when we were putting the video together and it struck us as an issue. We did how ever cut the part of him approaching the door and him walking through the door so that it seemed as if he had simply speed up as he got to the door.

When filming and editing our main film, we avoid problems like these by ensuring the screen switched to the other character if two shots following each other did not fit or were not fluent. We also spent more time making sure we cut to different shots nearest to the exact point it would switchover. A similar part of our main film is when Brad walks out of the library and through the door that leads to the stairs. We made sure the continuity of this part was as fluent as it could be and we feel it was a success.

The reason we wanted the continuity to be as perfect as we possibly could was to ensure that it seemed realistic. The whole real-life idea is very important in editing romantic comedies because of course the happy-ending romance may seem a little unrealistic, the continuous editing is key to still make it believable. This lead us to avoid any dissolves, fades or wipes.

We used shot-reverse-shot when Billy and Sean have their conversation, we used two different cameras and filmed the one conversation from two different points. The conversation was shot in medium close-up. Filming this was without difficulty for us, we were confident and happy with our results. Minor setbacks we had were with actors getting restless giggles, but of course the shots we needed were displayed in the end. After the conversation, Billy stands up and slaps Sean. We used a match on action on this part. It proved to be successful and quite funny from the way we had edited it. Perfect practice for a romantic-comedy. Billy had more prevalence and more screen time. We knew that Billy would be the one to slap Sean so we chose to film him from a slight low angle, to increase his power and Sean from a slight high angle, to display his inferiority.

We did want to use a tracking shot of Ella as she ran down the corridor at the beginning of the film. However due to not having the right equipment we were unable to produce this shot.

Again with the idea of realism, we ensured we filmed according to the 180 degree rule as this makes it seem like the audience are seeing the whole thing from a realistic point of view. The 180 degree rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. It is an imaginary line which the actors must stay on ones side of. We followed this rule in our preliminary and our main task.