Evaluation of the preliminary task

Considering we had only a few hours to film our preliminary task and the decisions to change the charachters and costumes, i think the end result was as good as we could make it. Are original idea for this task was to have myself playing a clumsy investigator who takes his job seriously interrogating an old woman, played by Jenni Dack. We encountered many problems in finding the costumes and getting into character to play these roles. To sort this out we changed our idea to a serious investigator, now played by Jenni Dack, interrogating a french exchange student played by myself. We decided to keep the genre as a comedy/thriller spoof as it still fitted in with the dialogue we had written and rehearsed.
The story line for this task is that the investigator is looking into a murder and trying to solve it. This leads to her interrogating a french exchange student who is believed to be a suspect. The french exchange student doesn’t entirely understand the english language, resulting in the investigator becoming angrier and angrier and storming out, leaving the suspect alone in the investigation room. We wrote this story line as it then created some short comical lines for the characters and fitted in with our spoof genre.
We used the shots that were needed for this task such as the shot reverse shot during the investigation, match on action when the investigator is coming down the corridor and then enters the investigation room and we used the 180 degree shot whilst both characters were sat at the table. We came across problems whilst filming these shots as we had to do it all by hand as we couldn’t find a tripod that worked so many of the shots came out shaky. When it came to editting the footage we noticed that we hadn’t succeeded in getting the full 180 degree shot due to not using a tripod.
We had to change our location as well because when we went to film the room we were going to use was not available so we had to use the board room at Sewell Park. This created many problems because the room was too big to make Jenni’s character seem menacing and give it the claustrophobic effect that you usually get from interrogation scenes. We also noticed that many things in the background made it seem like it wasn’t a real investigation room and ruined the effect and feeling we were trying to create such as students art work. Another problem we encountered with the location was that it was in the center of the school during lesson time so in the background you can often here young children in the corridors.
We used minimal props because it made it easier to keep the continuity. all that was used was a folder for the investigator and a cup of drink and a bag for the suspect. During each shot we had to make sure we kept everything in the same place which was difficult when we had to move stuff around for the next shot. We experienced a lot of difficulties when it came to editing it all together as many of the shots were cut off to soon and did not match the next shot. We could of improved this by watching the footage back whilst filming and making sure they matched up.
Overall after all the difficulties we encountered i think we tryed our best and i am reasonably pleased with the end result.