Film Prelim Evaluation

For my preliminary i worked with Katie, Kam, Tommy and Rob. Kam took the role of camera man, Tommy figured out the dialogue and helped Kam, Rob starred as the man, Katie as the woman, and I helped organise the shots and drew the storyboard. To plan our short peice we drew up a storyboard with our ideas, we made sure our peice would meet all the criteria and all came up with the idea of a scary peice. We used the video recorders and the Macs to finish our films, the Mac allowed us to cut our footage and to rearrange different shots. When shooting we had to make sure that there was no background noise, being in a large school this was diffult, and needed to make sure the lighting in the room was how we wanted it to be. The film conventions we have followed is using background music, using the 180 degree rule, match on action (with the door scene) and used a variety of lots of different camera angles. Before filming we had to make sure everyone was in place, we made sure the lighting was dimmed to make a scary atmosphere, that we had the right props to make Katie looked like she was tied to the chair, and used costume on Rob to make sure he looked intimidating and like a clear 'baddy'.
We can apply Barthes's codes as we have the action code of Rob looking scary about to open the door, and als0 we have an enigma code as we see Katie tied up and wonder why she is in this situaton.
I feel our video went well as we have achieved a quite good film that is interesting. Some things i would change are the fact our clips are a bit jumpy and didnt flow, to fix this i would of filmed more of each scene in one clip, rather than lots of little clips. Also, i feel our dialogue wasnt very clear so i would make sure the camera was closer to the characters so that we could hear what they were saying more easily. I felt out props and costume worked really well as it was obvious that Katie was in a awkward situation and that Rob was the badguy.
Producing a short peice of film was a lot harder than what i thought it would be, as i didnt realise how much i would have to take into consideration. Also, by working in such a large group, we had a lot of clashing of ideas as people wanted things doing their way - leading to disagreements. Im pretty sure at this point that i would like to do a Film as my coursework, but i would want to work in a smaller group so i could use more of my ideas and get more involved in the filming.