The Exchange - AS Media Studies [Preliminary Task]

Preliminary Task - Planning

For our preliminary task we had to create a short film that displayed the technique of shot-reverse-shot and contained conventions of a thriller. We had to work in chosen groups. In my group I had Ellie and Matt

Before we could shoot our film, we had to plan out:

• A basic storyline
• Props
• Camera Angles
• Dialogue between characters
• Movements
• Costume

We planned this out on a storyboard template. Matt came up the general outline of the story - a drug deal gone wrong; whilst Ellie drew the storyboard to the camera angles and prop I envisioned.Below are images of the storyboards we produced.

Preliminary Task - Shooting

After Planning out our final storyboard, we could start filming. Our Group used the Canon 550D to film in the Me5 classroom next door to ours. Ellie produced the filming whilst Me and Matt were the actors. I played the thug purchasing the drugs whilst Matt portrayed the undercover Policeman. After getting the colour balance correct for the low key lighting we were using to give the film a  LA Noir type feel, we began shooting. We used several props including a toy gun, a fake cigerette and a FAKE bag of cocaine (I repeat fake - flour). We had several lines of dialouge and included a working shot-reverse-shot. We had a few incidents where we couldn't get the camera working to standards but eventually we filmed all 13 shots of our short film. The shots we used were:

• A close up shot
• 6 over the shoulder shots
• An establishing shot
• An extreme close up shot
• 2 medium shots
• A pov shot
• A final master shot

We used a tripod on most of these to ensure a steady frame was produced and used panning and zoom on our final shot to make the scene emotional.

Preliminary Task - Editing

After finishing our filming, we began uploading and renaming our produced videos to our groups asigned computer. After doing so we created a new project on Adobe Premier and slowly inserted and cropped our files. Once the movie was clearly running smoothly we began editing the audio. Firstly, we muted any noise from the camera such as the tripod adjusting then we went onto www.freeSFX.co.uk and searched for apropriate sound effects for certain shots in our short film, for example we used a gun shot sound for the end of the piece and a soundtrack for our credits. This was apointed to me and ellie whilst the film was rendering. Matt then applied several transitions for certain scenes. After rendering out movie again it was complete. We saved the file to the correct format and image size and then later uploaded it to YouTube.