Preliminary Task - The Unsuspected

Plot

Our story is about John (Carl), who gets called into the room to have a chat with the head teacher (Freddie). John then gets paranoid because he thinks that the head teacher knows about his involvement with a year 7 who has died. The head teacher doesn't even know about this so he asks John about what happened. John starts to panic lots and tells the story of how the Year 7 kid tripped and how there was blood everywhere. John denies that he killed him and tells the head teacher that he wasn't sure what to do at the time of events. He says that he tried to help the little kid but was so in shock by the whole situation and that he didn't know what to do. John is heard stuttering his words and being a bit shaky with his hands. The head teacher then reveals that the only reason why he wanted to see John was because he had been bunking his classes but then takes an interest into the Year 7 situation. John then realises this and attempt to escape the classroom but the head teacher grabs his arm and attempts to find out more about the situation. John then quickly runs out of the classroom, almost tripping over, and then runs away from the classroom as the head teacher follows him. As John is running away, someone is walking along the corridor. John then bumps into him/her and quickly runs off again. The head teacher walks out and warns him/her to not say anything about what they have seen and then follows John again. The film ends with the mystery person walking off down the corridor as the camera fades to the credits.

In our film, we used a match on action right at the beginning of the film. The match on action happens when John is seen opening the door and entering the room where the camera is placed on the outside of the classroom. The camera is then placed inside the classroom and shows John entering the room in the same way as the previous scene. In both scenes, the first scene led on to the second scene.

We also used the shot reverse shot in our film. This happened in the dialogue scenes between John and the head teacher in where the camera would change sides depending on who was talking. For example, if the head teacher was talking, then there would be an over the shoulder shot showing John's head and shoulders and then we would see the head teacher talking. We feel that this made the film more interesting to watch instead of just using one camera angle for the whole conversation.

Also, in our film, we didn't break the 180 degree rule. We filmed the whole film from one side of the room which means that the head teacher always was on the left side of the screen and John was on the right side of the screen.

Unfortunately, we wasn't able to include an eye line match but we did try and do it but we felt that it wouldn't work very well. We tried filming a scene in where the camera was where the head teacher was sitting and then John was looking directly into the camera and talking to the camera (head teacher). After watching it back, we feel that it felt more like an interview then a film so we decided to cut that out.

Overall, we feel that we did this preliminary exercise pretty well as we included most of the techniques that we have learnt about. If we was to do this again, we would try and include an eye line match that would fit in with our story.