Preliminary Task Evaluation

Preliminary Task Evaluation
Connor Cushingham

For our Preliminary Task we created a short video roughly under forty seconds in order to practice our camera shooting skills and to see how much we could edit in Adobe Premiere. In the short video we followed a guide on what shots to make from a small power point presentation which was printed off and given to us. Throughout the video we were not to break the 180 degree rule in order to keep continuity errors to a minimum, the shots within the video were taken around the college and show the progression of a student running around towards the entrance after receiving a phone call which was implied to be a threat.

The film remains true to the 180 degree rule, keeping quite a steady continuity throughout the short video and makes sure that the viewer knows where the next scene is relative to the last. The short video makes use of several camera angles and shots which do well to emphasise the scenes. Each shot has a decent length of time given to it so that the shots aren't too fast paced while also making sure that the shots do not drag on too much either. We added a music track over the top of the video created in garage band in order to give some volume to the short sequence and give it an atmosphere of urgency. At the end of the video we also added a green screened explosion over the top of a still image of the school, using slightly advanced forms of editing in Adobe Premiere.

While we kept to the 180 degree rule in order to avoid continuity errors and keep the viewer invested without confusion we accidently ended up with a continuity error during filming which we had not noticed until afterwards when editing. There is a shot where our character checks their phone in one hand, however when the shot changes and he goes to put his phone away the phone appears in the opposite hand he was holding it with in the last shot. This provides a continuity error as the shots were back to back and he did not move the phone to another hand through a shot, it happened instantaneously. Another bad point would come from the explosion at the end, despite it being slightly advanced editing it isn't that refined, the lighting of the image behind the explosion doesn't compliment the special effect and so green tints are evident in the explosion which are results of the green screen. The explosion also doesn't show much realism to the scene, however that much is to be expected.

I believe the continuity error would be a good place to improve, it would only require the reshooting of a single shot which was not very long. The simple thing to do would be to look over the scene prior and then replicate it however with the simple change of having the phone in the same hand as it's supposed to be evident in the scene before. Another improvement would be to change the graphic of the explosion special effect so that it better fits the dimensions of the image behind it, to give it a better sense of realism.

In conclusion I believe that the short video turned out quite well, luckily the only errors being a single minor continuity error which would be difficult to notice without closer inspection due to the fast pace of the scene in total. Throughout the short video we used techniques in order to amplify the quality of the video such as original music and imported special effects.