Assessment Exercise - Original film

This is the orginal film that we re-made

Continuity

Arguably the most difficult aspect of cinematography is continuity; the ability of making each scene fit with the previous one and the next one, allowing the piece to look smooth.

In this exercise we filmed several scenes of a very basic succession of movements, and using good continuity ensured that each part fitted well. 

Whilst good continuity makes a film appear professionally shot, bad composition can make a section of film look awful and difficult to watch! 

Composition

One of the key aspects of making a film is composition- the way that things are set out on the screen, in the foreground and the background. If composition is good, it can make the whole film look professional and easy to watch, whereas poor composition can make each shot appear amateur and unrealistic. The best way to ensure that composition is of a decent quality is to use the 'rule of thirds', in which each shot is divided into nine equal squares. The key is to get important features of the shot (such as major facial expressions or items), and in the video which we created, we attempted to use this method to capture shots with good composition.

Below are a few examples of stills from films and other forms of media which show brilliant composition.

The main objective of the creation of this video was to concentrate on good composition, ensuring that every shot utilised the 'rule of thirds' and that it looked professionally shot. Although some of them appear fairly shabby, there are a few stills in this montage which we were quite proud of when referring to composition! 

Our Task

Hi!

As part of the IB SL Film Studies course, a compulsory section is making a short film of 4-5 minute duration (our personal choice has been to create a horror movie). While much of the emphasis is on the finished article, there is also a lot of other areas which must be covered, and one of these is to record our progress as we attempt to create a professional piece. We shall do this by using this blog.

Over the next few weeks, we will be getting to grips with the basics of film making: using the cameras and beginning to understand many of their functions, learning how to edit using various editing software, and gaining simple knowledge of continuity and composition using storyboarding. All of these basic skills will allow us to make a more well-rounded film later in the course.