Continuity task - the end product

This is the final continuity task, we filmed twice, as the original footage had a lot of technical errors that we wanted to improve on, like bad framing, with parts of the characters cut off, and some background noise that was overpowering the voices of the actors. We put this together quite quickly, so the editing is not perfect, and could have been finished to a much higer standard.





evaluation

Our final Continuity task was really quite poor, as there were so many technical incompetencies within it. firstly the positioning of the title at the very beginning is off, it is too far to the left, so some of it is cut off. this is an editing error that could be easily corrected, it more attention had been paid to detail. my next issue is with the transitions that were chose in the first few shots, they were used to slow the piece down and give the ilusion of time between the shots, but they are unneccesary and look quite cheap and amateur, so i would not have chosen them personally. i think this was one persons choice and we didnt work as a group enough when coming to some of the decisions. Next in the first shot, the character position in the shot is not right, it should either be central or not, but looks like it was supposed to be central. framing is a basic part of filming, and bad framing looks cheap and is less natural to watch. some of our framing was not right, and some of our positioning was simply not paid attention to, we have learnt from reviewing this that framing and positioning are more important than we originall thought, so we will pay more attention to getting them right in our opening. This is the shot where the positioning was poor:

the character would have looked better placed centrally, it would have looked much neater.

another issue we had was the angle we were shooting at, as we struggled with getting out tripod to be level, this gave some wonky shots that lookd unnatural and poorly filmed. looking back at this we now realise we need to check the spirit level on the tripod at all times to keep it level, this way it looks smoother and the change from shot to shot will be smoother and more realistic.

in this shot you can see clearly that it is not level, by looking at the celing and floor and the angle that they are at, this is poor quality filming, and we are going to make sure we dont do this in the final opening

A positive about our continuity task is the quality of the movement, the camera pans and tilts very smoothly, and ther is no jolts or shakes in the camera. This is sometimes tricky and something we are proud of, as the camera moves very fluidly. however, there is alot of background noise over the dialogue, and this is something we tried to avoid, but it was filmed in a noisy school so we must have been unlucky with timing, as there are certain times where the school is louder. this detracts the audiences concentration from the dialogue and makes it less enojyable to watch. the shot - revers - shot that we had to include as part of the guidelines was succesful, we did an over the shoulder on, which, while the editing was a little choppy, worked quite well. the end of the clip is the worse, as we left it un edited, we needed to cut it a bit shorter as their are some seconds at the end which weren't supposed to be included, and we dont have any outro transition, so this is another example of sloppy editing.

We have learnt alot from the continuity task, mainly what our groups strengths and weaknesses are, and that we need to communicate more as a group, a some of the elemtns of the continuity task were not decided on by the group but by one individual. we learnt alot about how to use the equipment, such as looking at the spirit level, and also about how difficult it is to get quality filming, because you need to take into account so many factors, such as positioning, noise levels, framing, angles that we didnt pay attention to whilst filming the continuity task. i think this has given us a greater knowledge because we have learnt from our mistakes that we made so frequently in this task.