PRELIMINARY EXCERCISES

CAMERA ANGLES

I have studied camera angles by reading Daniel Chandler's website 'The Grammar of Television and Film'.

http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/short/gramtv.html

Here I experimented with different types of camera shots, and what effect each of the angles gave.

I

ON THE SET

Today in class we learnt about Canon Cameras and Manfrotto Tripods. We were shown all the equipment and how to use them. This included how to insert the battery and memory card into the camera and how to film.

180 degree rule 

We learnt about the 180 degree rule, which is a guideline that states that two characters in a scene should maintain the same left/right relationship to one another. When the camera passes over the invisible axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line, and the shot is called a reverse angle.

On Set

We also practised on set terminology used in the film industry. This including the director shouting 'Standby' to tell everyone to be ready to film, and everyone else replied 'Standing By'. We experimented filming and taking pictures from different camera angles, and tried out the Green Screen for the first time.

PRODUCTION LOGO

This was my first time using photoshop, and I made a production label. I experimented with different colours, fonts, shapes and effects. For my first attempt, I think it was okay but there is definitely room to improve. This won't be my final logo, but I will use elements from this attempt when I do my final piece.

TABLE TOP EXCERCISE

We were asked to put together a table top film opening, inspired by Jean Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen title sequence. We could use a background soundtrack piece of our choice and unlike the other in my group a chose a song called Ego, which gave our piece an eery effect with a hidden message. We were asked to include both live action, as well as filming which displayed our set up table of props. All of these shots together helped us present our film theme, using objects such as blood stained money, old jewellery and newspapers which reflected 'mystery' - where a woman has gone missing.

This was an enjoyable task as it allowed us to be creative in choosing what Mise-En-Scene we wanted to use, to tell a specific story.  For this particular exercise, we used a hand held camera so we had to have steady hands for minimal shaking. We edited the clips and sound effects on iMovie. This task helped develop my production skills that would be useful when making our main production further on.

CONTINUITY EXCERICSE

With 2 others from my class we created a short film, to show our ability and knowledge of media. We used this opportunity to practising using of camera angles, editing and audio to create a film.  As a group we came up with the idea for the storyline, which was a teacher, who is also a bit of a stalker, stealing a schoolgirls phone as punishment, and the schoolgirl tires to sneak into the school to get revenge and steal her phone back. She got it confiscated because she broke the rules by using it during the lesson, and we have an establishing shot of me grabbing onto Grace's phone and stealing it. We had some POV shots, close up shots, and panning shots. We also had a high angle shot going up the stairs. We used our phones to film the short film and used iMovie to edit it.

On top of our Continuity Exercise, we used our media camerawork abilities to show off different angles we can use during filming. Using our friend Grace, we used 8 camera angles to show different ways of showing setting and emotions during filming. We edited this using iMovie, adding titles to every angled shot there was - such as longshot, pan, POV shot.