Preliminary Task - Miss Georgiou

My group members are myself, Lily Badcock and Jazz Chrystie.

The purpose of our preliminary task was to familiarise ourselves with the recording equipment and editing software, as well as learning how to use our knowledge of camera shots/angles and apply them to real-life filming situations. Our preliminary task involved filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple lines of dialogue. The task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule. It should last a maximum of one minute in length.

During this task, we learned how to: use the tripod and camera; edit using final cut pro; and apply the theory we have learned in class to this practical task. We slightly struggled with the editing as none of us have editing experience, but we overcame this by persevering and experimenting with the software to figure out certain aspects. Now, we are all familiar with the editing software. This task also made us realise how much work will be put into making our thriller film; we filmed for a long time (as we are all beginners) but edited this down to footage of under 1 minute.

An advantage of doing this task is that we all became familiar with the equipment, both for recording and for editing. This helps us build our skills and prepare for final recording. However, a weakness of this task was that we had little guidance while carrying out the task, so even after doing the preliminary task, we were just slightly above 'beginner'.

The preliminary task was an extremely helpful stage of this planning process. We now have experience with working with the equipment/software that we will be using when we film our actual thriller opening scene.