Prelim Evaluation - Question 3

3) 'Evaluate your prelim. What could be improved? What is already good about it?'

There are 3 main areas for improvement in our prelim, and they were; continuity, the use of the 180 degree rule and also the clarity, tone and volume of the actors voices.
When it came to continuity, in some aspects of the prelim, the lack of continuity is quite apparent to the audience. For example, the change in location is very clear, as the lighting is different in the 2 places, the colour of the door is different, and the desk is a different size. If we remained in the same location throughout, then the continuity in the prelim would have been good.
We could have improved on the 180 degree rule, because at one point in the prelim we break the rule. We film everything on our selected side, but the we accidentally filmed an over the shoulder shot, not on the selected side. We now know that we must always be aware of the 180 degree rule, and must check that every shot is abiding by the rule.
And finally, we could have improved on the sound and clarity, tone and volume of the actors voices. Although the majority of the time you can hear what lines the actors are saying clearly, there is a line in the prelim where the sound isn't as clear as it could be, and sounds slightly muffled. We now realise that before we begin filming we are going to express the importance of clearly projecting your voice to our actors.
There are 2 major elements that I believe make the prelim good already; the editing and some of the shots we chose to do. I feel that as a group, we did a pretty good job completing the editing. We all equally contributed to the editing, and we all enjoyed it-ending with productive results. I feel that the editing in the prelim was maturely chosen, and we all had reasons behind why we wanted certain elements in the prelim. Also, with the music, we wanted it to provoke reactions from the audience when they watched the prelim-so we spent time picking the right music.
I feel that our choice of shots were good, as we wanted to try out some certain shots that we all liked. For example, we wanted to try a panning shot, so we did, but this panning shot also coincided with a point of view shot, therefore making our choice of shots and the reasoning behind the shots, more complex. We wanted to avoid making the prelim look too amateurish-obviously we couldn't fully avoid that, because we are amateurs-but we tried to avoid making it look poor quality.