Preliminary Exercise Evaluation

Brief

Our production was all to do with a hostage. A man was kidnapped by the 'boss' since he didn't give him the money for some reason and therefore tied him up and started to torture him, which then led to the innocent man being dead. We used quite a lot of straight cuts and a variety of match on actions with some that had failed and also attempted to do the 180 degree rule.

Planning

First of all, in our group we had 4 different people including myself. We then had to split the work among ourselves; Me and Sunny did the script, Sunny did half of the storyboard with Rashida doing the other half and Ladan doing the shot list. I think that if we didn't split this work into 4, then we wouldn't have gotten up to the deadline of when the production was due and I still think we would've been still filming. However, we came across that and got everything complete. On the other hand, I still think that we should had a detailed storyboard and we also should've stuck to every single shot because when we were actually filming the production, it was half planned and half not planned which I think took a lot more time doing this. Therefore, our one improvement as a group should be stick more to our planning which would result in us getting the work done much quicker because we had only finished the production the day before we actually screened it.

Strengths and Weaknesses 

In this production, we had quite a lot of positives and very small amount of negatives which I think was really good and shows how well we did when it came to the planning because of this outcome. The types of positives we had from this production was the make up, the performances, the contrapuntal sound of when Sunny was listening to that sound track (when there was screaming in the background), the match-on-action at the beginning of the production and the handheld camera. The one that I believe was really strong with our production was the off screen violence and the lighting. We were able to join these two key techniques together by creating a shadow of the violence that was happening between the main protagonist and the antagonist by using our prop (the floodlight). The lighting itself was coming from underneath which allowed us to have the shadows of the two bodies on the white wall. I also believe that we had a good use of cinematography, as I think we used both the panning and tilt very well;  We used these two when the part of the main protagonist was tied up and there was a panning movement and then went to a tilt movement when it was showing the boss. Also, we used a wide range of close medium shots when the antagonist was speaking which I thought was done really well, as it caught the eyes of the audience since he seemed very angry by the look on his face and also quite intimidating since he was wearing that red tie and that long jacket. The red tie could be associated with blood which is also linked to death so that's why we got the character to wear this tie colour. The contrapuntal sound was used to show a bit of humor to the audience which suggested that you don't need to just have the production based on one genre only, it can also be based on something completely opposite which in this case it was comedy. In my opinion, I think that this contrapuntal sound created a  little enigma code of why is this 'so called' Heavy listening to music when he should be the type of guy who would kill someone and not listening to pop music. Throughout the whole of the production, there was a variety of action codes created, e.g. why was 'the Boss' playing with his ring and why was the knife of the table? 

On the other hand, the negatives that we spotted out in this clip was that we failed on the 180 degree rule. This is simply because when we were viewing the antagonist, when had the camera on the other side of him which therefore seemed that he was speaking to himself since the main protagonist hadn't been revealed at that time of the production. Therefore, in order to improve this next time, we need to do trial and error before we finally put it all together because if it doesn't look right, we can always change it before publishing it. Another thing we need to improve on is the sound because sometimes, 'the boss' may be speaking quietly and at another time, he may be speaking quite high pitched, e.g. when he was screaming, it was too loud for the audience and therefore, I think that the voice should be consistent throughout the whole production.