Pre-Luminary Task

During our media lesson the 22nd of September we were set a pre-luminary task in small groups. This meant we had to film someone walking through a door, walking across the room, sit on a chair where a short piece of dialogue must take place, and then they must leave the room again. The main point of this task, as well as becoming familiar and comfortable with the cameras, was to look at continuity. In this task we had to use match on action,shot-reverse-shot and the 180 degree rule.
I found using the cameras daunting at first as they were very professional and clearly very expensive. However, after sometime i did manage to become more comfortable with it afterwards and found that the cameras in-fact were not that hard to use.
Our scene we decided to film (which we named 'Your Late') was designed to be a short and simple but with a few creative shots to try and make ours different to other groups scenes. We wrote a short script for the section of monologue which goes as follows:

(Ash enters through the door and walks over to Alice)
Ash: Hey, miss asked me to give this to you
Alice: Oh, Thanks
Ash: (sitting down) So did you watch Waterloo Road last night?
Alice: Oh no i didn't, was it good?
Ash: Ah you should have, it was crazy!
Alice: Oh, didn't your lesson start 5 minutes ago?
Ash: Oh yeah, i'll see you later
(Ash runs off)

We had planned to film this in the canteen as we thought it would be a realistic setting and we also wanted to get a close up of the clock on the wall of the canteen when i say to Ash about her being late for her lesson. However, when we got down to the canteen we found there were too many people walking in and out and so there would be bad continuity if when we edited it there would different people in the background in different places. Instead we decided to film in the main entrance area by the reception as this was a much quieter area.
We used an over the shoulder shot during the conversation as we thought it would make the section of dialogue more interesting and visually pleasing to watch. We also experimented with some shot-reverse-shots throughout the dialogue. We tried different shots whilst Ash entered and left through the door, we tried tracking and panning shots and also tried just focusing on the door, i enjoyed trying out different shots and seeing the difference by simply focusing the camera on something different each time. I didn't find that aspect of the filming (thinking of shots we could do) incredibly challenging but very enjoyable but the actual practicality of filming more difficult and more tiresome as it involved lots of repeating of shots.