Preliminary Planning

Location: We already knew the idea behind our preliminary task, so we had to find somewhere that could resemble an office in a police station. After looking round different classrooms in the school, we decided to use one of the house offices for our location. The main reason for this was because it had large desks with computers on, and behind these desks was some display boards that looked very busy and added to the police office look of the room.

         

Casting: As this was only our preliminary task, we deiced not to audition  all of our group for acting roles and just came to the mutual agreement that Alex would act as the Inspector, Jordan would be the Superintendent and Maddie and I would be responsible for filming. This was an easy choice for us, as we though that with the scene being based around police officers, it would be more fitting for the boys in our group to take on these roles.

Camera Shots: This was the most important part of the preliminary to us, as we wanted to make sure that we included the three required camera angles (180 degree rule, match on action and shot reverse shot), but we also saw it as an opportunity to practice using these camera angles so that we would have more of an idea what we were doing when it came to filming our actual two minute film opening. Not only did we include the required camera angles, but we also tried some other angles that we had learnt about over the past few weeks.

Low Angle 

We used this low angle shot of Jordan's character walking towards the door as it showed that he was of a high status, and also incorporated the mise-en-scene element of the walkie talkie, which we believed helped the audience to identify that the character was a police officer and not just a random man. We also used another low angle, but this time of the door and from the other side of the corridor. However, after filming one shot from this angle, we realised that when Jordan stood in frame, he blocked the door handle making it hard to see the portion match on action that was of the door opening and we decided that this didn't fully meet the brief that we had been given.

Close Up

We decided to use a close up as a part of our match on action sequence, as we though this would add emphasis on the tasks that Jordan was completing. We also thought that by opening the door vigorously at a close up angle would reinforce the authority and intimidation of the character. It also added to the mystery of the scene, as the audience have so far only seen different parts of Jordan's body, not his face.

We also decided to use a close up as part of a tracking shot, but not as close as the opening on the door handle. At first, we used a standard tracking shot, but we felt that this revealed too much of the character to the audience, so we decided to use this medium close up to follow the character in the room. This was also considered as part of our match on action sequence, and incorporated one of the actions that we required in the brief.


180 degree rule

We incorporated the 180 degree rule as this was a large part of the brief and was one of the camera angles that we were required to use. This was the only angle we struggled to use, as we weren't sure how it would look in relation to the rest of the scene. As a result of this, we decided to shoot the 180 shot from a number of different angles, but still on the 180 degree axis.

Shot Reverse Shot

The last shot we included was a shot reverse shot, as this was as well part of our brief. This was much easier to include in our scene as the brief also said we needed to include two characters having a conversation, and we decided that a shot reverse shot would show this in the best way, and also show the status difference between the two characters.