Main Task 2.1 - (Synopsis)

After much debate and discussion on ideas we finally rested on a narrative. The synopsis is as follows:

Dan, an innocent man, discovers an unidentifiable body- in his panic he leaves evidence of his discovery. The police soon arrive and Dan, who aware of his mistake and in hysterics, runs away drawing attention of the police. The chase ends with Dan's arrest. He is soon released as more evidence appear to go against murderer but still police observe him and suspect he is an assailant in the crime. However, in the meantime, more murders are being committed. Though, Dan has no involvement in these deaths, evidence from the scenes point towards Dan. He becomes aware the police are looking to find him after watching the news on a business trip he is on. Dan has no choice but to become a fugitive. On the run, Dan begins to question who is setting him up and why? Is the real murderer simply passing the buck or is there a motive?

The resolution sees Dan decipher that the murder is in fact the mortician at the morgue as the body from the first murder keeps reappearing at the murder scenes. However, the police are not convinced as the mortician claims that the body was stolen and he was beaten up by the murderer, claiming to have just escaped death himself, he appears innocent enough. When confronted they both die. At first it appears Dan has murdered the mortician and had died in the process - this satisfy the police fore-thought ideas. However, they soon discover documents and forensic evidence that suggest the mortician was involved all from the start...it also claims that so was Dan.

The police conclude both Dan and the mortician tried to kill one another in order to stop each other from giving information to the police...Dan's effort to save his reputation were futile.

Preliminary Task 1.3 - (Evaluation)

After completing our editing we had the opportunity to self evaluate our work as well as offering our opinions on the work of others. The chance to be criticized, both positively and negatively, brought to light some aspects of our work that was well constructed and other features that were less so.

An issue that many members of the group picked up on that we, as a group, did not was a problem concerning continuity - at the beginning of the sequence a bottle of Lucozade was present on the desk. However, a shot a few seconds revealed that the bottle had disappeared - The fact that we did not pick up on this error and that others did shows how useful peer-evaluation is as a learning tool.

With pride aside, it allowed us, ourselves, to appreciate the errors in our shooting which included our characters sometimes disobeying the 180 degree rule. It was also pointed out that as our protagonist entered the room he blocked the camera from capturing the antagonists - this taught us to have more attention when considering positioning, of both character and shot. However, as a result, this allowed us to take note of our mistakes and help us prevent making the same errors again when progressing to the main task.

Preliminary Task 1.2 - (Filming & Editing)

After going about recording our preliminary task it came the time to edit our footage. After importing the footage into iMovie we went about a chronological ordering in relation to our editing. However, it soon came apparent to our group that one of our pieces of footage was missing for some reason unknown. This caused a particular problem in that we had only recorded this clip just the once; from this, we learned that it was important to record a scene/clip more than one time in order to provide us a with a range of clips to provide us with the choice of the most appropriate and as a fall back if one clip becomes defunct.
As stated in our storyboard and initial synopsis of our preliminary sequence, are key objective in this task was to successfully convey the 180 degree rule. We carefully selected our clips to make sure we followed this and feel as if we had achieved In our period of editing we did not insert a musical score to our clip as we only wished to convey the 180 degree rule.
At some stages where we had over-run time in which was not necessary or not needed we simply cut them out to make the clips shorter. Particularly so at the beginning of our sequence where the protagonist is walking down the corridor and the sequence alternates between the protagonist's fast paced marching in contrast to the antagonist, who is sat in solitary in the visiting room.

Preliminary Task 1.1 (Pre-lim - Storyboard)

Initially, we decided that our preliminary film sequence had to be in a format that would convey the 180 degree rule. Our group,. that consists of Karn Smith, Leighton Wardlaw and myself, then decided to settle on a prison visit format with a conversation being composed over a table.

The synopsis is that Leighton (the antagonist) has been imprisoned for a crime unknown to the audience and holds information on where the protagonist's (myself) wife is. The conversation is based on gaining information. The sequence includes some tense moments so it was appropriate to use some close up shots to convey anger or distress (see shot. 2/6 - bottom left).






In our short preliminary sequence we decided there would be no elaborate scenes that included action or fighting; we simply wanted to demonstrate that we could successfully obey the 180 degree rule.
This format would allow us to demonstrate the 180 degree rule. Our storyboard was our reference sheet on how to construct our shots when it came to filming. We used a variety shots that all fitted the 180 degree rule.