Continuity task

For our continuity task, we were asked to, in groups, film a simple piece where a person opens a door and sits down on a chair. This was a good way to learn how to use the cameras and to find out what sort of result we can be expecting in our thriller. The project did not take us very long to film, and showed us the basics and the limits of editing, which turned out to be very important when filming for the thriller task.

We learned three essential different techniques to help us in this project: The 180 degree rule, shot reverse shot and Match on Action.

The 180 degree rule states that two on screen characters will be given a side of the screen to work with, left or right. This avoids confusing the viewer who subconsciously assumes the character will always by on the same side of the screen, and is a very effective method of showing which character is which, even when they look very similar.



This scene from "The Lord Of The Rings" is a very good example of this. Although the scene uses the 180 degree rule for a different reason than we are going to , as this scene still would have worked without it, but its use strengthens the view that Gollum/Smeagol has a split personality, and the camera changing adds tension to the scene. It shows the split personality by assigning each one to a side of the screen, (left=evil, right=good)



Match on Action is a rule which ensures that the order of the shots is chronological and simple for the audience to understand. This is normally sorted out during the editing stage, as parts of a film can be shot in any order. This is normally standard in most films unless there is a flashback or other exceptions. These are normally made very clear what is happening so to not confuse the audience. However, some films (especially thrillers in particular) such as Memento deliberately play with the order of the shots to create a unique effect.

Shot / Reverse Shot simply shows a shot of the subject, and then rotates 180 degrees, and shows the viewer the result. The technique allows the viewer to see a person on screen, and then what that person is looking at, creating the effect that we are seeing what that person is seeing. The best thing about this shot is that it can easily be used to make it look like a character is nearly anywhere in the world very cheaply. For example, I could have a shot of myself against a wall and then flick to a shot of the Caribbean, making it appear as if I were looking at the Caribbean, presumably because I was there.



This is our finished continuity task. We would have liked to have created something of more quality, but we were still learning and tried to focus more on learning techniques for the thriller than spending too much time polishing this video. This is clear through the badly timed cuts, the wrong amounts of time used for each shot, the overall length, the lack of any character development or personality and of course my horribly stale acting. By the end of this project, we had learnt to use the camera fluently and the basics of the editing software we used, Adobe Premier Elements 1.0. There are several techniques we used in this which we carried through into our thriller, and several things which we didn't think worked and therefore changed, such as the camera angles used in the speech section, which were dull and identical. In our thriller we used a variation of shot types during speech to emphasize the emotions of the character.
As this is what we set out to do, and the skills we learned were invaluable for creating our thriller, I would consider the project a success, even if the actual end result was less successful.



This diagram shows the positions of the cameras, people and objects in the rooms we used for filming. Note how we never break the 180 rule, although we push it to the limit by placing the cameras exactly in front of the two actors. To compensate for this, we make them tilt their bodies towards each other, which creates the same effect as the 180 rule, so you can tell which character is which by the direction they are facing. We filmed in the same order that it is viewed, to avoid confusion on our part, and you can see from the diagram that we start at the top, following Tanwyn, then we have a shot of the door opening, and finally the shots in the room of us both talking. We shot the talking parts separatly, meaning that we did all the speech for one character, and then all the speech for another, and then spliced them together, as we only had one camera, and it saved us time, as well as meaning we would not have to move the camera from one person to the next constantly. We used the shot/reverse shot when we see Tanwyn walk in through the door. We see a shot of him open the door, and then a shot of the door from 180 degrees (or close enough to). This shows us that Tanwyn has walked into a new room.