Preliminary Task

When planning out the storyboard, I decided to use many mid shots and extreme close ups, This is typical of this genre. As I did not have access to a moving tripod, I did not use any tracking or crab shots.

I found that during the filming of our preliminary I had to focus on having a strong level of continuity. The classroom was adjacent to a busy corridor and several of our shots were unusable due to shadows passing through the door and noise from outside. At the fourth shot, where the "spy" enters the classroom, I realised that the lighting did not draw attention to the character sitting at the table, thus I had to switch off the light at the front of classroom which meant that the light at the back acted as a key light, and so the audience would focus more on Tom.

When I did this, the lighting between the first three and the rest of the shots was clearly different, so I had to go and re shoot these shots with the new level of lighting, which lead to more continuity errors (the position of the tables in the class room, the lighting of the classroom and the difference between this and the original shoot).

Another problem that I ran into was keeping the continuity when I did a forward roll, as the position of my hands had to look the same when changing shots, as well as picking up the paper from the desk. However I think that this turned out to be a success as my hands looked in the same position when switching shots.

The last continuity difficulty I ran into was whilst filming the last shot, the character walks out the door and the camera goes to a close up of the door whilst closing, but it seems like a person "appears" in the corridor when switching shots, so I had to leave this shot out.

Whilst editing, the shots seemed too orange and too warm, so I put a slightly blue gradient over all the clips, this was very effective as it seemed like a colder more spy-like scenario. As well as this, the sound from Tom was often quiet, however I over came this problem but detaching the audio and making it louder (150%).

I had difficulty in drawing a detailed and comprehensible storyboard, so someone else in my group had to re draw them.

A final problem was that the camera seemed to pick up a lot of back ground noise, which could have been from the fan in the room. We managed to lessen the negative effect of this by lowering the volume of some of the shots, in our Film Opening I will have to ensure that the camera I use is high quality and that there is little background noise on-set.

In my opinion, I kept a strong level of continuity throughout the film. Examples include at the beginning, when walking through the door my foot position had to be the same when changing shot, after the forward roll when I had to position my hands the same, and when walking out of the door at the end, when switching to a shot of the door closing. These are all examples of match on action.

Another strength was the stable lighting level throughout, achieved by putting a blue gradient over the footage, this also meant that the film setting became colder and more like the genre which I was trying to replicate.

Finally, my last strength was the quality and detail of the storyboard, it helped me picture how I wanted each shot to look and it gave me a reference to create each shot. When starting my opening I will definitely use a storyboard.