Preliminary exercise evaluation

Brief

To produce a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task has to demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.

Planning process and pre-production

When it came to planning we believed as a group that being organized was a fundamental part of the project. In order to achieve this we set each group member a task to do so everyone had a responsibility therefore we all contributed to the group. We as a group had a deadline for all the planning i.e. the storyboard, shot list and script to be all completed by Sunday. This enabled us to get on with the filming straight away as we had all the important elements for filming ready, and we knew how we wanted our final product to look. 

We also planned out our mise-en-scene by choosing a location within the school which we believed was suitable to fit the conventions of a typical "hostage" based film. We brought our own lighting in as we believed that it would give our film a better look. Make-up, costumes and props were used to make the film seem more professional i.e we used make up to make the victim look bruised and to create fake blood, costumes to make the antagonist look impeccable and props that fit the mise-en-scene such as scissors that were used to act as weapons. 

Strengths and weaknesses 

I believe there were several strengths and weaknesses within our final outcome.  The concept and storyline of our work was simple yet effective, and we put great effort into our mise-en-scene to make our scene fit the typical conventions of an interrogation scene.  During the course of our planning we decided to watch several film extracts to get an idea of what we want our final scene to look like. Reservoir Dogs came to our attention and influenced our work greatly, especially the murder scene where the camera tilts upwards to hide the horrific action. The use of several different shots instead of the usual such as P.O.V made our work more attention-grabbing, and we used our own lighting and different lenses to make our work look more professional. We made sure the editing was simple yet sleek, so everything was continuous and went in a good flow.

However, we did have some weakness that came to the attention of our viewers. Unfortunately, we were unaware of the fact that we broke the 180 degree rule, which made the protagonist look as if he was talking to himself rather than the hostage. The violence in the scene did not seem realistic which ruined the scene for some. We also lacked sinister music, which would have been more appropriate to the scene. There also was some static coming from the microphone which ruined it for some, and this could have been improved if we had edited the sound levels.

Overall, I believe our work was quite successful in terms of the concept and the overall outcome and look, and many people enjoyed watching it. However there could have been some major improvements such as not breaking the 180 degree rule.