Planning our first short film

Our task was to film and edit 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. Our short film must obide the 180 degree rule and include a match on action shot and a shot/reverse shot.
To start, we drew up a story board to plan what different shots we would use, plan the action within each shot and think out our dialogue. This was done on an A3 sheet to allow us to plan 8 different shots.
Our idea was to have a close up shot of a mans face walking up to a door, with an extreme close up of his hand opening the handle. We would then see a mid shot of a girl tied to a chair struggling, to a sudden shot of the first character inside the room. There would then be a point of view shot of the man walking over to the tied up girl, exchanging dialogue with her, before hitting her to end the scene. This idea would then cover the shot /reverse shot and the 180 degree rule by flicking from one person to the next while they speak, only using one side of them to film. Also, it would use the match on action of the character going towards the door then suddenly being inside the room.

1st Practical Practice

For my first practical I worked with Rob, Kam and Tommy. Firstly, we did multiple takes of all the various camera shots, repeating them so we had plenty to chose from when it came round to editing. Before and after each clip we made sure we left a 5 second gap to insure when editing we would have plenty of space to work with. To edit we used the Apple Mac computers and used the I Movie program. We selected our favourite clips of film and then edited them to all flow one after the other - and deleted the ones we did not want to use. When editing we had to do a variety of things: shorten the clips; make the clips faster; add music and add text. The music we used was a simple drum beat which we felt went well with our fast paced clip, we also added text to introduce the characters and to name the director and cameraman at the end.
I feel our video was good, seeming we had less time than others to get it edited. I was very pleased with our variety of camera shots as we covered all of them and thought the music matched well. Also, i wasn't in the film or filming it, i was just directing the shots, so next time i would like a go at actually using the camera to get a feel of how to use it properly. The quality of our shots were good as we used the tripod - therefore reducing the chance of a shakey shot. One thing I would change next time is what we actually filmed, 2 lads standing talking isn't very interesting, so next time I would try to think up something more imaginative to make a clip about.