Continuity Task Evaluation - A Day in the Life of Craig

We have now fully edited our short movie with all the continuity elements present. We would have finished the project earlier if it wasn't for the computer crashing and not saving our work completely but we managed to get it back up to scratch. Overall, the movie was of a much higher standard then our last one as we planned the scenes out a lot more by using storyboards to make sure we have all the scenes we need whilst taking more then one take of each scene so we can choose the best one or mix and match the best elements of each. Also we took the improvements given during our verbal feedback to include more varities of shots to help improve the overall quality of the movie and create a specific tone or atmosphere based on the present scene like the point of view/close up of Craig as he lunges at the camera, creating a much more frieghtening feeling then if we used a long shot for instance.

However, while the movie maybe an improvement in some areas there are still major problems. The most obvious one being the quality of the footage. We underestimated how quickly it got dark and as a result, our shooting could have been seriously effected. The picture below shows the extent of the effect the poor light had on our clips.

We did manage to improve it somewhat by using a decently lit tunnel near the arnison center which compensated for the poor lighting so we still got our clips shot on time. Another problem was the slight continuity error during the final scenes of our movie. As you can see below, Craig on the left has his hood up as he slams me against the wall but in the next shot he no longer has it up in the next screen. Unfortunatly we didnt notice during filming and couldn't fix it during editing so this is something we will make sure to look out for in our final project as this could seriously affect our mark.

Another slight problem was during our reverse shots between me and Peter. We wanted to do something different from the usual shot/reverse shot by doing a phone conversation to help bulid tension as Craig stalkes Peter on his end of the call. While we got the dialouge right and the quality was good, we notcied that we were both facing the same way not like reverse shots are meant to be. It was easily fixed though by adding a horizontal flip effect to the clip which reversed my parts of dialouge so I was now facing to the right of the screen while Peter was to the left.

In all, our project was an improvement over our previous one with more varied types of shot and flows a lot more smoothly in terms of narrative unlike the types of shot video. We completed each one of the continuity takes, reverse shot, action match and the 180 rule. The reverse shot was mine and Peter's conversation over the phone and the action match was done twice when I closed the door and when Craig threw me against the wall. The 180 rule was done when Craig walked behind Peter as we kept on the left side of him and made sure not to cross to the right hand side otherwise the rule would be broken. In general, the video is a much needed improvement to help achieve the high levels but there are still a few bugs and careless mistakes that could be easily removed and not hinder our mark.