Tazmin Lucas AS Media blog

On Friday last week we completed our Preliminary exercise:
A continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom he/she then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. Demonstrate match on action , shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.

Q. Technically, what is the 180 degree rule in the context of this task?
This is the rule that states when you are filming a scene with two people, you can only film inside a semi circle (180 degrees) on one side of an invisible line during the scene. This is because if the camera crosses the during the scene it can confuse the viewer because it make it look like the actors swap places during the scene. So if you apply the rule to the context of this task, the shots would all have to be on one side of the chairs which the actors sit on. Below is a diagram of the 180-degree rule:

Q. What is a match-on-action?

Match-on-action consists of two shots that are connected together to maintain the continuity of the action that the actor is doing in a scene; thus in relevance to this task the match-on-action would be the shot of them walking through the door, in which it starts off from behind with them opening the door and then cuts directly to a shot from the front of them walking through the door. Below is an example of match-on-action shot from the film The Descent.

Q. What is the shot/reverse shot?

Shot/reverse shot is when you have a shot that is in the opposite direction to the previous shot, giving the effect of looking from on actor to another. This usually takes place within a conversation between two people, as depicted in the clip from the Hunger games below:
r Games below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Ey0a6LJRA

Q.How did it go?

I think ours went okay, the concept was simple and something we all knew a lot about due to the fact it was about a student starting sixth form, and we filmed it all within our first couple of weeks as a sixth former. Therefore the plot was simple and easy to script, as well as making it easier for our actors as they too had just started sixth form thus it would have been easier for them to emphasise with the characters. We chose the sixth form cafe for our location, which was a good setting as it was simple and easily accessible but had some issues with noise and different people being in the background in different shots. For the casting we went and asked people in our year group who had frees at the same time that we would be filming to make sure they didn't miss any lessons, however this was a bit daunting and awkward at first as I was a new student to the school and didn't know anyone but the other people in my group helped cast as they has been at the school previously so there wasn't really any problems. The equipment was simple to understand and we didn't have any issues with that; however during the editing some of the shots were a different size once transferred onto the software to what we originally filmed, thus it took some time to figure out how to turn them back to their original size. Other than that we didn't have any problems editing because Megan had used the program before, so was familiar with how it works. Setting up my blog was also simple thus not an issue, I just had to create a gmail account to be able to access the website and then just follow the instructions.

Q.What would you change/ do better if you had the chance to do the task again?

If I was to do it again, I would either change the location to somewhere quieter or record the actors saying the script and then add that on top of the film to try and make the sound clearer as it is difficult to hear them with all the background noise. I would also try make sure that the people in the background were the same in shot to shot, as they change randomly due to the order in which we filmed the shots. Furthermore, I would make sure the actors were aware of what was expected of them before we started to film as we had some issues with them not knowing what they were doing because we hadn't told them before hand.

Here is the final video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAOGOr0n59I