Preliminary Sequence and Commentary

For my group's preliminary task, we had to create an opening sequence of a film entitled 'have you feed the fish?'. We were given a prompt sheet in which entailed a basic of outline of the narrative and what we were expected to produce, including the specified dialogue of which had to be said by the two actors and in which shot a tripod should be used. We had to decide upon our shot types, lengths and any costumes or props which we may have wanted to use in our opening sequence. For this, we created our storyboard outlining the basic ideas of which we came up with for our opening sequence, which is as follows:

Although we have covered the necessary required elements stated in the brief, we did encounter some problems which we did not anticipate beforehand and of which would not like to repeat when we come around to producing our final opening sequence. The camera we were provided with did not allow us to record sound properly, and for this reason our project was not as successful as it could have been. To ensure that we do not confront this issue again, we need to ensure that we have fully working equipment, including any additional add-ons of which we may need for this equipment to work, and are assured that we know exactly how to operate this equipment, before we leave to shoot our planned scenes for our opening sequence.

Instead, in order for us to overcome this problem, we decided that it would be a good idea between ourselves to include subtitles over our video clips and recordings to ensure our audience to be able to follow what was happening in the scene. In my opinion, I believe that this was effective in fulfilling its purpose in allowing the audience to understand what the plot was and to also enabled us to achieve an effect which created a scene of a atmosphere and let the viewer to question as to why we cannot hear the characters. Perhaps her feeding the fish wasn't so important after all?

Forgetting the aforementioned negatives, there were some positives to come from completing our preliminary task. I should mention one of these as our continuity editing. We utilised the skills of which we had learnt in class and lessons to create a smooth, realistic transition between shots of one of our actors running/jogging through the park gates in order to meet the other actor, as she was incidentally running late. The outcome of using this technique provided a clean, clear edit between our taken shots, and this added to the overall enjoyment and feel of our opening sequence.