Preliminary Task, AHMED, PART 1

Day 1: Planning and Filming of Preliminary Task

During the time that work was set to commence on my preliminary task, two of the members of my group were away on a trip, so I was assigned, by my teacher, Mr. Hull, to work with Rez, a member of another group.
Prior to this (the previous lesson, in fact), we were shown famous examples of storyboards by our teacher, Ms. Sellars. The storyboards shown were ones by artist J. Todd Anderson, and they were used during the production of Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old Men.” These storyboard were shown to us, I believe, in order for us to get an idea as to how we should produce the storyboards for our own pieces, both the preliminary task, and the opening of our fiction film.
We were also shown, by Mr. Hull, examples of scripts. We were shown two in total. The first was the script for Juno, written by Diablo Cody, and the second was a mock-up script penned by Mr. Hull himself. The scripts were shown to us, I believe, in order for us to get an idea as to how we should write our own scripts for our own pieces. I, myself, had had experience writing scripts in the past, but I still felt that this was an enriching and rewarding exercise.
We were then given storyboarding sheets. The descriptions were written by me, and the drawings themselves were drawn by Rez. Both the drawings and the descriptions were simple, but I feel that they were effective and were put to good use considering what they were going to be used for.
Originally, our script for the preliminary task was going to be very minimalistic, with two short, simple lines of dialogue (“Hello,” and “Goodbye.”) This notion was quickly rejected by Mr. Hull. I feel, in retrospect, that this was the right decision. The reason being is that not only would our initial idea have been extremely pretentious, but it would have also been pointless, and would have made no sense whatsoever and would not have been interesting in the least bit, both to make and to watch. The decision we came to was that we should try to make the story told within the preliminary task be simple, but be interesting enough to be watchable.*
We initially handwrote our script, and after giving both the handwritten draft of the script and the storyboard to Mr. Hull for approval, we typed up the script using one of the Macs which is situated in our classroom. We used Courier New 12 Point (the industry standard). The decision to format the script in this was, I feel, a good, worthwhile exercise, if only to maintain a certain level of professionalism.
Then, came the filming of the preliminary task. We used a Sony HD Camera. This camera, I feel, was superior to the XM2 (the other camera that was available to use). The main reason is, I feel, the camera gave the final product the look and feel that it was shot on film, rather than on digital video.
The first day’s filming of the preliminary task took the better part of an hour to complete. We filmed in a corridor and a single classroom, which was just across the way from our Media room. We adhered to the shots described in our storyboards very closely. We used long shots, handheld point of view shots, and over the shoulder shots, all of which were depicted in the storyboard. Although some of the takes we filmed were ruined by passersby and flubbed lines, I feel that this only added to the overall experience of making the preliminary task, which was a very insightful and rewarding one.
Once we had completed filming, Mr. Hull, Rez, and myself viewed the rushes. Although we were happy with ninety percent of what had been shot, there were still some shots that we felt needed to be redone, especially one of the over the shoulder shots, which was shot in such a way that it broke the 180 degree rule, and, therefore, was useless to us. We decided that, since we had another lesson the next day to get the task done, that we would simple redo the over the shoulder shot so that it adhered to the 180 degree rule, and then begin editing the task.