Preliminary task

Our task was to create a short continuity piece; this piece was our first attempt at filming. This meant it would give us practice filming and editing for when we film our thriller. In our continuity piece we were told to include basic angles and a short part of dialog between at least two people. And of course we had to make sure the continuity was regular all the way through.

Planning for continuity piece

These are the story boards we made to help us when filming; it shows photos from the start of each scene.

Plot
The main plot for our piece was a character being paranoid, so we decided to call it ‘paranoid’. It involved a main character, played by Sarah- a girl in my group but also included charlotte at the end for the dialog. We filmed in and around the school. We tried to choose areas that we dark or separate from anyone else in the school, to give more of an alone feel. The piece features sarah running from the top stairs to the bathroom in the 2 floor. The idea is that its after school hours and she is completely alone in the school, she is scared as she can hear noises which are only in her head. She is out of breath and is panicking, she looks over her shoulder a number of times to show the fact she thinks someone maybe there or following her. However when she enters the toilet and finally sits down in the cleaners cupboard she hears the other toilet doors slam but this time it isn’t her mind it’s a teacher wondering what she’s doing there.

Editing
To edit our piece we used a macbook laptop, which we all contributed to, editing was fun and fairly easy to use.

Evaluation
As this was our first attempt with the camera I thought it was quite successful. We included all we were asked to, dialog and the basic different camera angles and put it together as a sequence quite well. Our continuity was perfection all the way through and there are no obvious mistakes with the editing. However the only big problem for the piece is in the ‘toilet scene Sarah bangs the door and then it cuts only for the next scene for the door to bang for a second time. We tried to cut this off but we were unable to as otherwise it wouldn’t make sense.
We wanted our piece to increase in tension and to be scary and heart racing. We achieved this by setting it to black and white, using high tempo music and also using a hand hold shot were Sarah held the camera and ran down the stairs whilst breathing really loudly. We didn’t really think about lighting but we tried to film in areas where there was enough light to see Sarah clearly, but because of the time scales we were filming at it was going dark early because of the season so we had trouble filming before it went dark.
Generally I think our piece worked well because we had some good ideas before we started filming also we had good equipment to edit it. Whilst doing this task I have learned that planning is a fundamental requirement in order for your filming to be complete quickly, efficiently and to a reasonable standard.