PRELIMINARY EXERCISE

Camera Angles and Shot Types 

I have studied camera angles and shot types by reading professor Daniel Chandler’s website called The ‘Grammar’ of Film and television

Shot sizes:

Long shot (LS): Shot which shows all or most of a fairly large subject (for example, a person) and usually much of the surroundings. 

Close up (CU): A picture which shows a fairly small part of the scene, such as a character's face, in great detail so that it fills the screen. It abstracts the subject from a context.

Medium shot (MS): Medium Shot or Mid-Shot (MS). In such a shot the subject or actor and its setting occupy roughly equal areas in the frame. In the case of the standing actor, the lower frame passes through the waist. There is space for hand gestures to be seen. 

Big close up (BCU): forehead to chin. Close-ups focus attention on a person's feelings or reactions, and are sometimes used in interviews to show people in a state of emotional excitement, grief or joy. In interviews, the use of BCUs may emphasise the interviewee's tension and suggest lying or guilt. BCUs are rarely used for important public figures; MCUs are preferred, the camera providing a sense of distance. Note that in western cultures the space within about 24 inches (60 cm) is generally felt to be private space, and BCUs may be invasive.

CONTINUITY EXERCISE

ON THE SET 

Prior to filming, we passed around the camera and each of us practised how to handle the camera, insert the battery and memory card. We also learned how to set up the tripod and to ‘bubble’ it using the spirit level to help make the camera balanced and in focus. We explored the camera such as how to focus, how to begin filming. The exposure on the camera is adjusted by moving the dial up and down.

After learning how to use the camera and balance it on the tripod we looked at the title sequence ‘Delicatessen’. At the beginning of the sequence insensitive laughter drowns out the man’s final whimper as a meat cleaver comes crashing down, delivering his end as well as the opening titles for ‘Delicatessen’. In the butchers shop there is a hanging pig, swaying back and forth, in and out of the shadows. The falling notes of a piano ushers the camera toward a notepad, passing a severed hand along its way, and the first set of film credits. With a gory charm, the title sequence floats through various twists and turns, the camera fluently capturing remnants of survivor’s past, while the jovial intro music underscored the film’s black comedy. 

By watching the opening sequence to ‘Delicatessen’ it influenced us to make a similar opening sequence using the same camera movement but using different objects to create a different story line. For our task we had to place different object on the table top, that had a black cover over it. The objects we chose were: old letters, old pictures of a couple, a wedding dress, wine bottles, pearls and talcum powder to make it look like drugs. Next we took the table top shot, by using the objects we were able to tell our story of a girl looking through old pictures, drinking her sorrows away. After taking this shot we had to take a live action shot, for this shot we videoed a girl with a prosecco bottle going to buy drugs, this conveyed a sense of missing her true self which lead to us naming our short story saudade.

When filming our table top shot we had a range of problems such as: we kept getting the floor in the shot which would ruin it as it is a different colour to the table cover we used to it was obvious, we also found that we didn’t have enough objects so we had to push the objects we had closer together, which ended up benefiting us. We also had problems doing our live action shot as we did it one day and we didn’t get a long enough shot, as we went to shoot some more the following day, we realised our actor had different clothes on. This meant we had to reshoot the action shot, when we did it again, we shot it in a different place which benefited us again as it was a more secret area than where we shot it before. 

Once we finished shooting our short film, we began editing it, the song we used in our opening sequence was Nostalgia by Emily Barker. The film title we chose due to the context of our film was ‘Saudade’ which means ‘missing’ in Portuguese. The credits we used were all our names (Leila Saville, Evie Hand, Morven McIntyre and Jessica Power) we put these throughout the opening sequence.