Criticising my first film.

In our first video as a group, we were not trying to tell a story, instead, we were just trying to practise our camera work and execute the shots we were told about in class.

The shots which are not shown in our video include; over the shoulder, this is because the footage we had for an over the shoulder shot was lost. Having said that, we did film an over the shoulder shot and now have the skills required to integrate it into our next project. The other shot we did not show is the rolling shot and that was because we couldn’t really do it as the rolling shot involves filming something that is moving quickly and keeping it in focus.

Even though this time around we did not tell a story, we did put a reasonable amount of thought into how we would portray each shot.

Firstly, for our long shot, we had James standing at a distance with his hoodie up portraying a mysterious and dangerous character, seeing as he was far away from the camera there was no information given to the viewer about who he is or why he’s there, which is an effective use of the long shot.

Next, we displayed medium shot and tracking shot in the same film sequence, which included myself and James walking down a corridor with Danny a short distance in front of us, this effectively showed a medium distance shot as well as tracking.

For our extreme close up, we had a shot of James’ eye, although there’s no story being told here this effectively shows that we understand what an extreme close up shot is, which is what we were trying to achieve.

Our point of view shot included two people standing still while another person held the camera close to his own face to show what a person would be able to see if he was in that scenario, this was an effective way to display POV.

Our low angle shot included our camera man standing at the top of a staircase while another person walked down the set of stairs, this is as close as we could get to representing a crane shot as well as a low angle shot, but we did so with relative effectiveness given our circumstances.

Our high angle shot included the camera man standing at the bottom of the staircase while another person was half way up, the camera man positioned the camera on the floor and filmed the person walking down the stairs, a simple and clear example of the shot.

Our pan shot started with the camera faced at the wall, it then pans to the left and focuses on two people having a conversation, then pans out again, we chose to do this because we thought it was effective at showing how films sometimes show obvious and important details when they use the pan technique.

Our tilt shot was a very basic one, simply focusing on a person at the very start and then tilting.

The choices for our shots were effective as it showed our understanding of each shot very clearly.

When I was asked to handle the camera, I did it with reasonable effectiveness but I was not the best in the group, I was filming the high angle shot and as I was moving the camera down there was some jitteriness, the motion was not fluid. This is a mistake that I made that I will fix next time I will be handling the camera.

As far as framing each shot, we did it well, because the ideas we came up with before filming are reflected well in the footage we created.

Considering we were only trying to display our understanding of each shot in this film, I personally think it is good as we did so effectively, however, in some shots, the camera movement is as fluid as it would have been in a professional film, and this is what we need to fix for our thriller project.