'The Unsuspected Evaluation - Preliminary Task

Plot

The story we created was based on a innocent school boy (John played by Carl) who was asked to speak to his head teacher. He thinks he is in trouble because he accidentally pushed another school child down the stairs when he is only there to speak about the lessons he has not been attending. 

Overall Technical Points

At 0:05 of the exercise, we see carl entering the teachers class room and at 0:10 we used a match-on-action shot to connect the movement between carl on the outside of the door and on the inside of the door. The next shot moves into a sequence of shot/reverse shot where we see the head teacher speaking to carl from the different angles. at 0:25 we used a low angle shot to make carl appear bigger when he confesses. This isn't something we planned to work as he is nervous when he confesses. However the idea of carl being further away makes him appear more nervous and distressed than freddie who we can only see part of. The follow through shot has dialogue that challenges carls confession. I decided to write this part of the script to make sure the audience would understand that the head teacher did not expect carl to confess this kind of action. We asked freddie to put the 'dead cat' on the side and to lean forward in this shot. This gives the audience the idea that freddie is fully concentrating on what carl has to say. Carl continues to talk and get himself into more trouble and this ends with him 'breaking down' and trying to exit (0:43) but the head teacher holds him back and gives a cliffhanger line at this point where he says 'now we have a serious problem'. At this point carl runs out and crashes into another teacher (0:51) This is another match on action as we see him run from the class into the hallway at the same pace. Here we tried to do an eye-line match where the head teacher would look at the other teacher and give the small amount of dialogue we improvised on set, however this did not look effective at all and we decided to leave it out, 

Personal Overview

I think this task went extremely well considering me and my group started with little to no ideas of how to make this task just as good as our others without having a similar storyline. We edited this piece over the course of two lessons which proved to be worth it in the end. Me and my group take editing seriously and we spent a lot of time making sure the match on actions were perfect (the door creak took us a while to perfect). There is not anything i would really change about our piece as we used the most of what we had to work with. The only thing i wished we could have changed was the shape of our set. As we couldn't move the desk in the class we had a small amount of space to put the camera and therefor we couldn't use the space efficiently.