Continuity Exercise

Before we filmed our opening sequence we had to do a continuity exercise as a practise run which showed us how difficult it is to film something as there is so much to think about. For example, filming a simple match on action took us at least 10 minutes to sort out where the 3 cameras we used were going and what would be in their vision.

A match on action is an action filmed from 3 different angles at the same time. For example if a man is jumping there might be a camera filming the 'taking off' from a medium height, another camera filming from below the jump and a final camera filming the landing from a low or worm's eye angle.

Taking off

Below the jump

The landing

Our continuity exercise is 2 people in a room talking about and exchanging an envelope; one character is paying off the other to keep quiet about a crime. The receiving character opens it expecting money but it's actually paper and when they look up, the other character has gone leaving with the real money. Because we didn't have names for these characters and we were confused as to which one was the real 'baddie', it took longer than we thought to actually film a simple extract of it.

Another thing which was difficult to grasp was leaving 5 seconds after the camera started recording before doing anything to enble that we had enough duration to edit and cut. The other character (Alex) and I kept starting straight away which obviously wasn't the best thing to do as there wouldn't be any extra time if we needed to cut or edit.

This was the first time most of our group had actually used a camera with a tripod and it was very confusing trying to get the camera to do what we wanted on the tripod! Also, there were a few angles that were difficult to film on a tripod, for example at one point we had to balance the tripod on a chair which was dangerous as it almost fell off a couple of times!

All in all though we managed to get it all filmed in one lesson and it made us as a group realise what a lot of time and effort goes into making a short (or any) film. This also made us realise that we had to think a lot more about how to position our shots and angles and prepared us for our big task; a 2 minute opening sequence!