AS Media Preliminary Task

The Brief

For our preliminary task, we had to shoot and edit a short film. It had to fill the following requirements:

• Opening a door
• Over the shoulder shot
• Exchanging a couple of lines of dialogue
• Crossing a room
• 180 degree rule
• Match on action
• Shot/ reverse shot

Research and planning

In our group of me, Eve Grundy, Chloe Biggs and Josh Kamara, we came up with a concept of a highly competitive fashion show. We went down this route as a lot of people were doing spy, action or horror type stories, but we wanted to be a bit different and come up with a more unique idea. We drew a storyboard as a group, a picture of which is included below.

We came up with the title ‘Rain on your parade’ because it is a play on words – when people say that they will rain on your parade it means steal your thunder or take the lime light, which is what happens in our story, and parade was good because we meant it in the sense of a fashion parade.
We decided not to use any extra props except ones that we had on us at the time, so that we wouldn’t waste any time trying to find extra ones in school or at home and could get to filming as soon as we could.

Filming

Our first shot was an establishing shot of the stage, and included me as a model walking up the stairs on the right, towards the cleaner at the other side of the stage.

After this, we changed to a POV shot of me waving at the cleaner and then proceeding to go backstage into the ‘changing room’. We realised the lighting here wasn’t brilliant, but for the purposes of continuity we decided to keep it in so the story and journey made sense.

For me to go into the changing room, we changed to a long shot as I was walking down the stairs and then a pan across to me beginning to open the door.

We then decided to open the door in five shots, so we could practice getting in a lot of angles and practice our editing in post production to get it tight and continuous. We firstly did an extreme close up of my hand pushing the door open,

and then a close up of my feet going through the door,

and then we went the other side of the door to an extreme close up my foot coming down in front of the camera, which we realised in post production was out of focus but had no time to re film it,

and then switched to a medium tracking shot of my other foot coming through the door and then panning across as I walked past and away from the camera towards another door.

 

 

Seeing as there were another two doors to go through here, we decided to film me pushing one door and then switch to the other side when I was pulling the other door and then walking into the room. This was only because we didn’t want the prelim to be too long, and we also didn’t want it to be boring.

 

Whilst I walked into this room I was waving at Chloe, the other model who was already in the room, and we switched into a medium/long shot of Chloe in the room with me walking over to her and we had a couple of lines of dialogue here.

We had to change it slightly from the storyboard because there was a lesson in the drama studio next, so we couldn’t stay and film the conversation between the two models. We also had to change the order and put the trolley shot after this shot, again for continuity purposes and so that we had a location we could film in at the time we were filming.
Our next shot was the trolley shot of me and Chloe holding up frames to represent mirrors, so that the camera could ‘see through’ them to us. It moved to the right past us both whilst we had another couple of lines of dialogue. Because we were running out of time, we had to cut the scene from the storyboard of one girl trying on the coat/blazer with the other one looking jealous.

We then went right to the next scene was of the actual fashion show. We decided to use a POV shot of Chloe walking across the stage and looking at the director rather than the long shot of her walking across the stage because we felt it would have been too static and boring.

We then switched to an over the shoulder shot of Josh as the director talking about the blazer, with Chloe preening in front of him. We again changed this from the storyboard because we hadn’t yet used an over the shoulder shot, and we wanted to use as many shots as we could to make it interesting.

This then switched to another POV shot of Chloe thanking the director, and a scream makes her suddenly turn to the right to see me running at her. As I get to the camera I cover it to make it look like I had hit Chloe.

We then switched to a long shot of me hitting Chloe and standing in front of the director.

Switching to another over the shoulder shot, I talk to the director whilst Chloe gets up. Chloe and I then leave the stage and we switch to a long shot of the director walking across the stage to pull the curtain across. We realised afterwards that the lighting wasn’t good but couldn’t do anything about it again.

After a close up of Josh's hands pulling down the curtains,

we filmed the final shot - an establishing shot of the curtains closing.

Post production

This is a screenshot of the final timeline of the piece. As you can see, we added in some titles and text, as well as adding in some music and removing sound from some of the clips.

This is showing removing the sound from the clip. Once we detatched it, we deleted it seeing as we didn't want it.

This is the clip with the sound detatched. It is underneath the video clip seeing as it has been taken out. We then deleted it because we wanted no sound in this clip.

This is what the clip looks like with the sound deleted.

The music we used was Latch by Disclosure. We used this music because it is an upbeat dance song which we thought fitted with our video seeing as it's the kind of music you would find in a fashion show. We added a fade out at the end so that the music would gradually fade out instead of stopping suddenly, as we thought this sounded better. You can see the fade at the end of the music, it is the dark arc in the last part of the song.

We had to spend a lot of time editing certain parts of the video, like going through the door. We needed it to be as tight and smooth as possible, and I think we were quite successful in getting the timing for it as perfect as we could considering the short amount of time we had.
Here is a link to our video!