Continuity Task: Filming And Editing

The continuity task has been on my mind recently; I wasn't exactly proud of our final cut (I get that it's a practice, but even so) but it was what any practice should be: a learning curve. We can promise ourselves to build upon our mistakes but, having done our first shoot of our final piece, I don't know if we have. Admittedly, although I've held off an evaluation until now, and I probably should have done this a while ago, I actually think an evaluation now is more relevant to my learning than an evaluation back then: What were the mistakes we made back then? Have we continued to make these mistakes in our final piece? Hindsight is an good thing, and reflection is an important component to improvement... And so, with that in mind, take a look at our final piece.



Looking back on this, I have to say I think we have improved; the continuity task was essentially a chance for our teachers to assess our ability at that stage, but really it gave us as a group a chance to work out our working style as a group: who was the leader, who worked well with the camera etc. This was invaluable practice for us as a group, and meant that going into our first cut we had a clear idea of our roles and responsibilities within the group dynamic.

One thing that I realised was that we would often divert from the storyboard; although storyboarding can make the process of filming quite tedious, a storyboard should give the filmmaker confidence in what they're going to shoot. Often we found that our ideas at the storyboard process were too ambitious, and so we'd often have to come up with fresh ideas whilst filming, which, well, wasn't ideal. And because we diverted from our storyboard, our timing was off by quite some distsance.And so, since then, we've put more of an emphasis on our storyboard and making it the best we possibly could before beginning the shoot.

In addition to this, I felt we could have had a more diverse range of shots and camera angles. For instance, the long shot of me walking down the corridor was too long in terms of the time it ran for, and I felt we should have perhaps cut it up with  a POV shot or a close-up of my angry face, etc. A series of quicker cuts would have also conformed nicely to the conventions of the thriller genre.

In summation, I feel as though, although our continuity task wasn't great (and we could have put more effort into as a group), it was fundamental to our progression as a group. I felt we developed skills and responsibilities, and made us more confident with what we were doing going into the continuity task. We've been able to act upon our flaws in this task, and the improvements we've made since then are notable, and emphasise how much of a learning curve this task was.