Preliminary Task: Editing Practice

As we start filming on Tuesday, we began looking into the editing parts of the task by having a little play with Adobe Premiere Pro. I made this video by cutting and adding effects such as ghosting and different colour effects to this cat video.

Preliminary Task: Location Hunting

Max, Andreas & myself have begun the production part of the preliminary task and by doing so we have began hunting for a good location in the school to begin filming.

Science Corridor

In the picture above, the science corridor provides a good mise-en-scene as it gives the overall effect of the film an eerie setting and with both diegetic & non-diegetic sounds with will add in later this would be effective in showing negative connotations of how the movies narrative plays out.

We also looked into different places in which we could have filmed and out of all of the locations we looked at, we all took the decision to use both the science corridor and the English store cupboard.

These are some of the other places we considered, we didn't believe the ICT corridor was big enough and the humanities corridor was too bright even with the lights off.

Like usual, Max did something worth making a funny picture out of.


EDIT: We decided not to use the English store cupboard in the end but to use the Science computer room as it was easier to access and it was closer to where the science corridor was so that we could get more filming done in the time we had available.

Preliminary Task: Storyboard

This is the storyboard that indicates how we will carry out the practice film. It shows the camera angles, and how we will position the protagonist and the antagonist. Our narrative is the antagonist (Max) is an assassin hired to kill the protagonist (Andreas) who is all tied up. The film will show the antagonist going to the protagonist, killing him and ending shortly after some dialogue.

Side 1

Side 2

Preliminary Task: Brief

In this task I have partnered up with Max and Andreas. We have to make a short film showing different camera angles as a practice for the main task later in the school year. In addition, we have also learnt what continuity editing is and how we will implement this into our film. The continuity editing techniques we learnt were:

• 180 Degree Rule - A basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object in a scene. An imaginary line called the axis connects the characters, and by keeping the camera on one side of this axis for every shot in the scene, the first character is always frame right of the second character, who is then always frame left of the first. The object that is being filmed must always remain in the centre, while the camera must always face towards the object.

Diagram of the 180 degree rule.

• Match-On-Action - Refers to film editing techniques where the editor cuts from one shot to another view that matches the first shot's action. Although the two shots may have actually been shot hours apart from each other, match on action gives the impression of continuous time when watching the edited film.

• Shot/Reverse Shot - A film technique where one character is shown looking at another character, and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character. Since the characters are shown facing in opposite directions, the viewer assumes that they are looking at each other.

Example of shot/reverse shot from Casablanca.

Framing a Shot: The Laughing Gif

Max, Emma & myself really enjoyed our task for yesterday and in response I made this .gif. I decided to make this .gif as a way of practicing with creating .gif files.

Framing a Shot: Practice with Stills

Today, Max, Emma & myself were tasked with going and taking a few stills using different camera angles, distances and effects/tools with the theme of creating a narrative. Emma was the protagonist and Max and myself were the antagonists and the narrative was depicted to be a chase of the protagonist by the antagonists.

First we used an establishing shot to set the scene of location we were creating the stills at.












We used an extreme close up of the protagonist to show her emotions which in this picture shows that she is worried or scared.

We used the protagonist at a mid shot relative to the background to show that she was emotional but also trying to escape the antagonists. We used a black and white effect as we were practicing with the camera.










The low angled shot was used to show how intimidating the protagonists were and to show how tall they were in relation to the background and surroundings.









The use of three different viewpoints of the antagonist Max made it show as if he had eyes everywhere. It also made it out to show that we were hunting for the protagonist which we were chasing in the narrative.




On the second picture we also used the "rules of thirds" technique to show the antagonist fully but to also show that he was leaning on the tree and searching for the protagonist.

The third one we created a shot behind the tree to make it look like the protagonist was hiding but could also see the antagonist who was looking for her.

We used the effect of leading lines to draw the audience to see that a chase was in action and that the protagonist was in front with the antagonist in close pursuit.

This image which shows the end of the chase and the protagonist trapped by the antagonists was used with the tool of "rule of thirds" which meant we could align the picture perfectly which showed everything that was happening in the end of the narrative.

Welcome to my Media Studies Blog

Hello. My name is Max Biddlecombe; I am now a Media Studies student at
Tupton Hall School in Derbyshire.

I enjoy watching movies and television and I consider it one of my hobbies. I also own and use a Youtube channel where I post videos of Games, and some other stuff whenever I can be bothered and/or have the time.

I would like to learn a little bit about different video editing programs as I am dominant with Sony Vegas Pro 12 and I use the program very often with my works with Youtube. I would also like to learn and use certain camera angles in which I have been taught in schools and in programs such as Defiance & Under the Dome.

In addition, I am considering going to university to study Media Production.